Cascading traffic jamming in a two-dimensional Motter and Lai model

Abstract

We study the cascading traffic jamming on a two-dimensional random geometric graph using the Motter and Lai model. The traffic jam is caused by a localized attack incapacitating a circular region or a line of a certain size, as well as a dispersed attack on an equal number of randomly selected nodes. We investigate if there is a critical size of the attack above which the network becomes completely jammed due to cascading jamming, and how this critical size depends on the average degree 〈k〉 of the graph, on the number of nodes N in the system, and the tolerance parameter α of the Motter and Lai model.