An efficient local cascade defense method in complex networks

Cascading failures in networked systems often lead to catastrophic consequence. Defending cascading failure propagation by employing local load redistribution method is an efficient way. Given initial load of every node, the key of improving network robustness against cascading failures is to maximally defend cascade propagation with minimum total extra capacity of all nodes. With finite total extra capacity of all nodes, we first discuss three general extra capacity distributions including degree-based distribution (DD), average distribution (AD) and random distribution (RD). To sufficiently use the total spare capacity (SC) of all neighboring nodes of a failed node, then we propose a novel SC-based local load redistribution mechanism to improve the cascade defense ability of network. We investigate the network robustness against cascading failures induced by a single node failure under the three extra capacity distributions in both scale-free networks and random networks. Compared with the degree-based (DB) local load redistribution method, our SC method achieves higher robustness under all of the three extra capacity distributions. The extensive simulation results can well confirm the effectiveness of the SC local load redistribution method.