Vulnerability in Networks - A Survey

The analysis of vulnerability in networks generally involves some questions about how the underlying graph is connected. One is naturally interested in studying the types of disruption in the network that maybe caused by failures of certain links or nodes. In terms of a graph, the concept of connectedness is used in dierent forms to study many of the measures of vulnerability. When certain vertices or edges of a connected graph are deleted, one wants to know whether the remaining graph is still connected, and if so, what its vertex - or edge - connectivity is. If on the other hand, the graph is disconnected, the determination of the number of its components or their orders is useful. Our purpose here is to describe and analyses the current status of the vulnerability measures, identify its more interesting variants, and suggest a most suitable measure of vulnerability.