Resilience of networks to environmental stress: From regular to random networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how different network topologies respond to environmental stress, revealing that disordered networks can suddenly collapse at critical stress levels due to their small-world properties, highlighting a resilience-vulnerability trade-off.

Contribution

It introduces a novel perspective on network resilience by focusing on external environmental stress and demonstrates the impact of topology on collapse behavior.

Findings

Disordered networks exhibit sudden collapse at critical stress levels.

Small-world topology provides initial resilience but leads to vulnerability beyond thresholds.

Regular networks disintegrate gradually under increasing environmental stress.

Abstract

Despite the huge interest in network resilience to stress, most of the studies have concentrated on internal stress damaging network structure (e.g., node removals). Here we study how networks respond to environmental stress deteriorating their external conditions. We show that, when regular networks gradually disintegrate as environmental stress increases, disordered networks can suddenly collapse at critical stress with hysteresis and vulnerability to perturbations. We demonstrate that this difference results from a trade-off between node resilience and network resilience to environmental stress. The nodes in the disordered networks can suppress their collapses due to the small-world topology of the networks but eventually collapse all together in return. Our findings indicate that some real networks can be highly resilient against environmental stress to a threshold yet extremely vulnerable to the stress above the threshold because of their small-world topology.