Connectivity strategies to enhance the capacity of weight-bearing networks

TL;DR

This paper explores connectivity strategies in weight-bearing networks to significantly improve their capacity and stability by adding disjoint clusters, with potential applications across various network types.

Contribution

It introduces two novel strategies for adding disjoint clusters to enhance network capacity and stability, applicable beyond the studied hierarchical networks.

Findings

Networks with added disjoint clusters bear higher weights.

Strategies reduce network failure rates.

Different strategies optimize for capacity or stability.

Abstract

The connectivity properties of a weight-bearing network are exploited to enhance it's capacity. We study a 2-d network of sites where the weight-bearing capacity of a given site depends on the capacities of the sites connected to it in the layers above. The network consists of clusters viz. a set of sites connected with each other with the largest such collection of sites being denoted as the maximal cluster. New connections are made between sites in successive layers using two distinct strategies. The key element of our strategies consists of adding as many disjoint clusters as possible to the sites on the trunk $T$ of the maximal cluster. The new networks can bear much higher weights than the original networks and have much lower failure rates. The first strategy leads to a greater enhancement of stability whereas the second leads to a greater enhancement of capacity compared to the original networks. The original network used here is a typical example of the branching hierarchical class. However the application of strategies similar to ours can yield useful results in other types of networks as well.