Comparative Network Robustness Evaluation of Link Attacks

Existing link attack strategies in networks differ in the importance or robustness metric, that quantifies the effect of a link removal upon the network's vulnerability. In this paper, we investigate the role of the effective resistance matrix in the removal of links on a graph and compare this removal strategy with other state-of-the-art attack strategies over synthetic networks. The results of the analysis show that the effective resistance and the link-betweenness strategies behave similarly and are more harmful than the degree based strategies when evaluating robustness with different performance measures.