Robustness of Regular Graphs Based on Natural Connectivity

It has been recently proposed that the natural connectivity can be used to characterize efficiently the robustness of complex networks. The natural connectivity quantifies the redundancy of alternative routes in the network by evaluating the weighted number of closed walks of all lengths and can be seen as an average eigenvalue obtained from the graph spectrum. In this paper, we explore both analytically and numerically the natural connectivity of regular ring lattices and regular random graphs obtained through degree-preserving random rewirings from regular ring lattices. We reformulate the natural connectivity of regular ring lattices in terms of generalized Bessel functions and show that the natural connectivity of regular ring lattices is independent of network size and increases with monotonically. We also show that random regular graphs have lower natural connectivity, and are thus less robust, than regular ring lattices.