Effect of edge removal on topological and functional robustness of complex networks

We study the robustness of several network models subject to edge removal. The robustness is measured by the statistics of network breakdowns, where a breakdown is defined as the destroying of the total connectedness of a network, rather than the disappearance of the giant component. We introduce a simple traffic dynamics as the function of a network topology, and the total connectedness can be destroyed in the sense of either the topology or the function. The overall effect of the topological breakdown and the functional breakdown, as well as the relative importance of the topological robustness and the functional robustness, are studied under two edge removal strategies. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.