Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2016) 131: 219
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2016-16219-y

Regular Article

The effect of link-based topological changes and recoveries on the robustness of cooperation on scale-free networks

Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of Ministry of Education, Xidian University, 710071, Xi’an, China

^* e-mail: neouma@mail.xidian.edu.cn

Received: 26 March 2016
Accepted: 24 May 2016
Published online: 1 July 2016

Abstract

The emergence of cooperation is one of the key metaphors behind many social disciplines and phenomena. Existing studies show that intentional attacks on nodes damage the robustness of cooperation distinctly, and the heterogeneity among nodes promotes the emergence of cooperation. However, the impact of link-based attacks and the connectivity of networks on the cooperative mechanism is still unclear. In this paper, we focus on the effect of edge removal on the emergence of cooperation together with the connectivity of networks. The results show that malicious attacks evaluated by edge-degree are efficient to invade cooperators, and heterogeneous networks tend to perform poorly when attacks arise. Furthermore, we analyze the performance of several recovering strategies, and conclude that the connectivity is crucial to the recovery of functionality of whole networks.