STRUCTURAL CHANGES CAUSED BY ERROR AND ATTACK TOLERANCE IN US AIRPORT NETWORK

Abstract

Through the study of US airport network, we find that the network displays a high degree of error tolerance and an extreme vulnerability to attacks. The topological properties, including average degree, clustering coefficient, diameter and efficiency, are slightly affected when a few least connected airports are removed. Such properties change drastically with the removal of a few most connected ones. The degree distribution and the weight distribution under errors behave similarly to those of the original network. Under attacks, the degree distribution changes from a two-segment power-law to a monotonic one. While the under-attacked weight distribution still displays a power-law tail, with the exponent changing from 1.50 to 1.24.