Dynamic behavior analysis of an internet flow interaction model under cascading failures

Cascading failures in the internet have attracted recent attention due to their unpredictability and destructive consequences. Exploring the failure behavior patterns is necessary because they can provide effective intervention approaches to prevent huge network disasters. To analyze internet flow behaviors during cascading failures (chain reactions in router and link failures), we characterize the internet as two coupled networks, the router network and the flow network. Here the flow network is an abstract representation of data correlations obtained from the router network. We use this coupled network to build a cascading failure model for studying flow transmission and competition, which is reflected in bandwidth competition given by limited link capacity. We first study the dependency between routers and flows to explore the flow transmission efficiency when a failure event occurs. Moreover, we find that rerouting enables flow competition area (the number of flows with which one flow has a competitive relationship) to initially remain stable during a failure episode, but that it then quickly drops due to poor physical network connectivity. Additionally, in the early stage after the failure event, the degree of flow competition sharply increases because of the growing number of the flows and congestion. Subsequently, the flow competition decreases due to the failure of flow transmission.