Robustness during Network Evolution

Robust networks can maintain their characteristics under perturbation, which is rooted in the different topology structure.However, previous study of the relationship between network robustness and topology structure is based on a static context. We study the effects of network topology on the network robustness from an dynamic points of view. We explore robustness to two types of perturbation on two categories of networks during network evolution to perform some pre-established function. We demonstrated that scale-free networks perform inferior to homogenous random graph on mutational robustness, which facilitates the evolutionary search to perform the target function; while they are superior on robustness of attractors to random graph, which demonstrates the higher tolerance to state inversion. These results may highlight the ubiquitous existence of scale-free topologies in nature.