Attacks and cascades in weighted scale-free networks

Large cascading failures are present in most of infrastructure networks. This paper reviews the problem of cascades of overload failures on nodes in the security of complex networks. Here we propose a nonlinear load-capacity model for cascading failures based on the dynamical redistribution of the flow on the network. The simulation was executed on the weighted scale-free network and Internet AS level network. We show that the entire network may collapse for the breakdown of a single node of the entire network if the node is among the ones with highest loads. This is important for real-world networks such as the Internet, which has a highly heterogeneous distribution of loads.