ABSTRACT
The information security model is composed of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Availability is
the area of information security that requires services and network components to be continuously
available for the user community. If a service or component is unavailable, confidentiality and integrity
are meaningless. Network availability is the underlying component that must be present in order for
services to be accessible for end users. Developers have used redundancy to assist in ensuring that an
application or network is available; however, this is an expensive solution if several network components
and services are involved. Computer networks, the electrical power grid, the protein network of a cell,
and many other scale-free networks have inherent problems. In order to understand the problems that
reside within scale-free networks, an understanding of the concept of scale-free network construction
must be observed. Discovered by the research performed by Baraba
´
si and his team (2003), scale-free
networks are first identified by the characteristic of power laws. By examining a power law histogram
(Exhibit 129.1), the components of the power law follow a downward decline, indicating the presence of
many small nodes and a few large nodes.
