Traffic-level community protection in telecommunication networks under large-scale failures

Large-scale failures in telecommunication networks make the preservation of the connections inside a community a challenging task, being traditional approaches focused on the preservation of the global connectivity. To achieve this goal, a new concept of community is proposed, which combines not only the topological information of the network but also the traffic-level interaction. Moreover, six novel community-based strategies to determine best node candidates to be protected according to a limited budget are assessed. The proposed strategies have been tested over four different types of networks and compared to other well-known immunization or protection methods. The obtained results show that, depending on the network topology, either an improved intra-community or global traffic preservation can be achieved w.r.t. traditional approaches.