Targeted Attack of the Air Transportation Network Global Component

Abstract

Targeted attacks aim to disintegrate a network by removing nodes or links. Classically, in node attacks, one removes nodes in descending order of a given centrality measure. Although most real-world networks exhibit a mesoscopic structure, strategies proposed in the literature do not exploit this ubiquitous property. We introduce an attack strategy based on the network component structure to overcome these drawbacks. The component structure of a network consists of local components and global components. The local components are the dense parts of the network, and the global components are the nodes and links connecting them. We investigate this attack on the world air transportation network using Degree and Betweenness centrality measures. Results show that the degree-based attack on the global component is more effective than the classical attack on the entire network. In contrast, the classical Betweenness attack slightly outperforms the Betweenness attack on the global component. However, the latter is more efficient.