Figure 3
Drop in the size of the largest cluster of the WAN against removal of links.
Connections are ranked according to the number of passengers using it. In high traffic removal, each subsequent step corresponds to removal of all connections up to a fraction, q, with the highest number of passengers. In low traffic removal, each subsequent step corresponds to removal of all connections up to a fraction, q, with the lowest number of passengers. The random removal strategy is an average over 500 statistically independent simulations and each step removes a fraction, q, of connections chosen at random. After removing 40% of the busy connections, 72% of the network is still connected, shown in the top-right map. The bottom right map shows that after removing the same fraction of idle connections, the world disintegrates completely, revealing the vulnerable nature of the periphery of the network (22% connected). The black nodes are not part of the largest connected cluster. The remaining colors represent different continents and show the nodes that are part of the largest connected cluster. All maps are produced using Gephi28.
