Self-Healing Protocols for Infrastructural Networks

A crucial feature in implementing the next generation of smart grids is how to introduce self-healing capabilities allowing to ensure a high quality of service to the users. We show how distributed communication protocols can enrich complex networks with self-healing capabilities; an obvious field of applications are infrastructural networks. In particular, we consider the case where the presence of redundant links allows to recover the connectivity of the system. We then analyse the interplay between redundancies and topology in improving the resilience of networked infrastructures to multiple failures; in particular, we measure the fraction of nodes still served for increasing levels of network damages. Hence, we consider healing performances respect to different network topologies (planar, small-world, scale-free) corresponding to various degree of realism. We find that the most balanced strategy to enhances networks' resilience to multiple failures while avoiding large economic expenses is to introduce a finite fraction of long-range connections.