A Distributed Algorithm to Critical Node Identification in IoT Networks
Abstract
The increasing integration of Internet of Things (IoT) networks in various sectors has intensified the need for advanced security mechanisms to mitigate vulnerabilities. Among these, critical node detection has emerged as a key strategy to improve network resilience. In this paper, we introduce a distributed algorithm to address the Component-Cardinality- Constrained Critical Node Problem (3C-CNP) in IoT networks, a variant of the widely studied Critical Node Detection Problem (CNDP). The 3C-CNP involves identifying the minimal subset of nodes whose removal results in the fragmentation of the network into connected components, each containing no more than a specified number of nodes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first distributed solution proposed for this variant. We provide a detailed description of the algorithm and analyze its computational complexity. Furthermore, we validate its performance through extensive simulations using CupCarbon, a widely recognized tool for designing and simulating IoT networks.
Keywords
Critical nodes, Network connectivity, IoT networks, Distributed Computation, CupCarbon IoT simulator
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
A. Lalouci and Z. Farah, "A Distributed Algorithm to Critical Node Identification in IoT Networks," in Journal of Communications Software and Systems, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 43-52, March 2025, doi: https://doi.org/10.24138/jcomss-2024-0125
@article{lalouci2025distributedalgorithm,
author = {Ali Lalouci and Zoubeyr Farah},
title = {A Distributed Algorithm to Critical Node Identification in IoT Networks},
journal = {Journal of Communications Software and Systems},
month = {3},
year = {2025},
volume = {21},
number = {1},
pages = {43--52},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.24138/jcomss-2024-0125},
url = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.24138/jcomss-2024-0125}
}