Critical Nodes Detection in IoT-Based Cyber-Physical Systems

The new generation of fast, small, and energy-efficient devices that can connect to the internet are already used for different purposes in healthcare, smart homes, smart cities, industrial automation, and entertainment. One of the main requirements in all kinds of cyber-physical systems is a reliable communication platform. In a wired or wireless network, losing some special nodes may disconnect the communication paths between other nodes. Generally, these nodes, which are called critical nodes, have many undesired effects on the network. The authors focus on three different problems. The first problem is finding the nodes whose removal minimizes the pairwise connectivity in the residual network. The second problem is finding the nodes whose removal maximizes the number of connected components. Finally, the third problem is finding the nodes whose removal minimizes the size of the largest connected component. All three problems are NP-Complete, and the authors provide a brief survey about the existing approximated algorithms for these problems.