Mitigation strategy against cascading failures on social networks

Cascading failures are common phenomena in many of real-world networks, such as power grids, Internet, transportation networks and social networks. It´s worth noting that once one or a few users on a social network are unavailable for some reasons, they are more likely to influence a large portion of social network. Therefore, an effective mitigation strategy is very critical for avoiding or reducing the impact of cascading failures. In this paper, we firstly quantify the user loads and construct the processes of cascading dynamics, then elaborate the more reasonable mechanism of sharing the extra user loads with considering the features of social networks, and further propose a novel mitigation strategy on social networks against cascading failures. Based on the real-world social network datasets, we evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the novel mitigation strategy. The experimental results show that this mitigation strategy can reduce the impact of cascading failures effectively and maintain the network connectivity better with lower cost. These findings are very useful for rationally advertising and may be helpful for avoiding various disasters of cascading failures on many real-world networks.