Global disassortative rewiring strategy for enhancing the robustness of scale-free networks against localized attack.

The robustness of complex networks against attack has been an important issue for decades. Most of the previous studies focused on targeted attack (TA) and random attack (RA), while recently localized attack (LA) has drawn the attention of researchers. However, the existing studies related to LA mainly aim to reveal the properties on various network topologies so that the strategy to enhance network robustness against LA is still not well studied. In this paper, we propose a global disassortative rewiring strategy to enhance the robustness of scale-free networks against LA without changing the degree distribution. The validations are conducted on simulated scale-free networks and two real-life networks. As global disassortative rewiring strategy outperforms the other strategies, it can be proved effective in enhancing network robustness against LA and may contribute to future network risk reduction. In addition, by avoiding calculating and comparing the localized-robustness measurement within each rewire operation, our strategy offers a significant advantage in computational efficiency.