Abstract
Networks are known to be prone to node or link failures. A central issue in the analysis of networks is the assessment of their stability and reliability. The main aim is to understand, predict, and possibly even control the behavior of a networked system under attacks or disfunctions of any type. A central concept that is used to assess stability and robustness of the performance of a network under failures is that of vulnerability. A network is usually represented by an undirected simple graph where vertices represent processors and edges represent links between processors. Different approaches to properly define a measure for graph vulnerability has been proposed so far. In this paper, we study the vulnerability of cycles and related graphs to the failure of individual vertices, using a measure called residual closeness which provides a more sensitive characterization of the graph than some other well-known vulnerability measures.