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Public Library of Science, PLoS ONE, 2(9), p. e87986, 2014

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0087986

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Self-healing networks: redundancy and structure

Journal article published in 2014 by Walter Quattrociocchi, Guido Caldarelli ORCID, Antonio Scala ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

We introduce the concept of self-healing in the field of complex networks modelling; in particular, self-healing capabilities are implemented through distributed communication protocols that exploit redundant links to recover the connectivity of the system. We then analyze the effect of the level of redundancy on the resilience to multiple failures; in particular, we measure the fraction of nodes still served for increasing levels of network damages. Finally, we study the effects of redundancy under different connectivity patterns—from planar grids, to small-world, up to scale-free networks—on healing performances. Small-world topologies show that introducing some long-range connections in planar grids greatly enhances the resilience to multiple failures with performances comparable to the case of the most resilient (and least realistic) scale-free structures. Obvious applications of self-healing are in the important field of infrastructural networks like gas, power, water, oil distribution systems.