Testing mission-oriented network reliability via hierarchical mission network

Network systems have become more and more complex with the fast evolving technologies in order to accomplish those missions that are too complicated to be finished by any stand-alone system. The question of how reliable these network systems are facing those complex missions requires our prior attentions. Different from a stand-alone system carrying out one mission at a time, the network systems deal with many missions simultaneously. It is natural to model these missions as a mission network. In this paper, we employed a two-layer network model, including mission network and physical network, to test the network reliability against its missions, called mission-oriented network reliability. As observed by many researchers, the hierarchy is one of the most common phenomena in complex networks. By quantifying the hierarchies of the mission network and the physical network, we investigated the effects of the coupling between the hierarchies of these two networks on the mission-oriented network reliability. The simulation results show that the positive coupling between the hierarchies of the two-layer networks leads to the same positive correlation between the mission-oriented reliability and the significance of the hierarchy of the mission network; and similarly, the negative coupling between the hierarchies results in the negative correlation between the network reliability and the significance of the hierarchy of the mission network.