Measuring Network Robustness by Average Network Flow

Infrastructure networks such as the Internet backbone and power grids are essential for our everyday lives. With prevalence of cyber-attacks on them, measuring their robustness has become an important issue. To date, many metrics have been proposed. It is desirable a metric to possess following three properties: considering global network topologies, strictly increasing upon link additions, having quadratic complexity in terms number nodes sparse networks. This paper proposes use Average Network Flow (ANF) with unit edge capacity metric, shows that it satisfies these properties. Especially, algorithm by leveraging Gomory-Hu trees proposed compute ANF. The tree embeds all-pairs maximum flows this into its edges, thus enabling achieve complexity. Moreover, compares ANF seven existing representative metrics. By experimenting scenario which topologies preserve numbers links, several new phenomena reported.