Avalanche-size distribution of Cayley tree

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the distribution of avalanche sizes caused by single node removals in Cayley trees, providing an analytical understanding of network fragmentation during targeted attacks from a micro perspective.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical method to study avalanche size distributions in Cayley trees, focusing on micro-level node removal effects during network attacks.

Findings

Derived the analytical distribution of avalanche sizes in Cayley trees.

Showed how single node removals can cause cascading disconnections.

Provided insights into network immunization strategies.

Abstract

Attacks on networks is a very important issue in developing strategies of eradicating spreads of malicious phenomena in networks, such as epidemics and fake information, which are generally named in the research networks immunization. The traditional approach of evaluating the effectiveness of attacks on networks, is focused on measuring some macro parameters related to an entire attack, such as the critical probability of a percolation occurrence in the network $p_c$ and the relative size of the largest component in the network - the giant component, but not considering the attack on a micro perspective, which is the analysis of the node removals, during an attack, themselves, their characteristics and results. In this paper we present and apply the last method of focusing on the micro scale of an attack. Based on the theory of percolation in networks, we analyze the phenomenon of an avalanche results due to a single node removal from a network, that is a state in which a removal of one node belongs to the network's giant component causes other nodes to be also disconnected from it, which is a much greater contribution to the fragmentation (immunization) of the network than only the single original node removal itself. Specifically, we focus ourselves on the parameter of the size of an avalanche, which is the number of nodes that are disconnected from the giant component due to a single node removal. Relating to a random attack on a network of the type of Cayley tree, we derive analytically the distribution of the sizes of avalanches occur during the entire attack on it, until the network is dismantled (immunized) and the attack is terminated.