Toward bio-inspired network robustness - Step 1. Modularity

Biological systems have evolved themselves to withstand against perturbations so that a characteristic, called robustness, is the most commonly observed feature in all living organisms. To find out the secret of robustness in biological systems, many researchers have investigated the system level structure of biological organizations. One of the known structural features that enable biological systems to be robust is modularity. In this paper we study the correlation between modularity structure and robustness in IP networks. We carry out a simulation study to observe resistibility of different topologies, which have different level of modularity structure, against a perturbation created synthetically. The numerical results show that the quantified modularity seems to be more important measure to understand robustness of IP networks than any other common properties such as clustering coefficient, degree distribution, and average path length.