Mitigation and recovery of cascading failures in scale-free networks

Cascading failure in a network refers to a situation when the failure of a node causes the failure of its neighbouring nodes, which in turn leads to the failure of other nodes in the network. Cascading failure happens in many real world networks e.g., power grid, packet routing networks. In this paper, we investigate cascading failure in Coupled Map Lattice based scale-free network. We propose that the nodes with high centrality should become defence nodes so as to mitigate cascading failure. We also investigate the use of fast-recovery nodes to speed up the recovery of the network from failure. Simulation results show that, by setting those nodes with highest degree as the defence nodes, it can effectively prevent cascade from spreading. On the other hand, the use of fast recovery nodes can significantly shorten recovery time of the whole network after failure.