Eur. Phys. J. B (2012) 85: 262
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2012-30290-0

Regular Article

Robustness of correlated networks against propagating attacks

¹ Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, 6-3-09, Aramaki-Aza-Aoba, 980-8579 Sendai, Japan
² Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, Kita 10, Nisi 8, Kita-ku, Sapporo 060-0810, Japan

^a e-mail: hasegawa@m.tohoku.ac.jp

Received: 4 April 2012
Received in final form: 30 May 2012
Published online: 30 July 2012

Abstract

We investigate robustness of correlated networks against propagating attacks modeled by a susceptible-infected-removed model. By Monte-Carlo simulations, we numerically determine the first critical infection rate, above which a global outbreak of disease occurs, and the second critical infection rate, above which disease disintegrates the network. Our result shows that correlated networks are robust compared to the uncorrelated ones, regardless of whether they are assortative or disassortative, when a fraction of infected nodes in an initial state is not too large. For large initial fraction, disassortative network becomes fragile while assortative network holds robustness. This behavior is related to the layered network structure inevitably generated by a rewiring procedure we adopt to realize correlated networks.