Novel Rewiring Mechanism for Restoration of the Fragmented Social Networks after Attacks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel rewiring mechanism to restore fragmented social networks after attacks, using strategic and budget-constrained approaches, and evaluates robustness through Laplacian Energy rather than just connectivity size.

Contribution

It proposes a new method for network restoration that considers Laplacian Energy for robustness, offering a deeper analysis of network resilience post-attack.

Findings

Rewiring improves network robustness against attacks.

Laplacian Energy provides a comprehensive measure of network resilience.

Strategic and budget-constrained rewiring effectively restore network connectivity.

Abstract

Real-world complex systems exhibit intricate interconnections and dependencies, especially social networks, technological infrastructures, and communication networks. These networks are prone to disconnection due to random failures or external attacks on their components. Therefore, managing the security and resilience of such networks is a prime concern, particularly at the time of disaster. Therefore, in this research work, network is reconstructed by rewiring/addition of the edges and robustness of the networks is measured. To this aim, two approaches namely (i) Strategic rewiring (ii) budget constrained optimal rewiring are adopted. While current research often assesses robustness by examining the size of the largest connected component, this approach fails to capture the complete spectrum of vulnerability. The failure of a small number of connections leads to a sparser network yet connected network. Thus, the present research work delves deeper into evaluating the robustness of the restored network by evaluating Laplacian Energy to better comprehend the system's behavior during the restoration of the network still considering the size of the largest connected component attacks.