Cascading failures are crucial issues for the study of survivability and resilience of our infrastructures and have attracted much interest in complex networks research. In this paper, we study the overload-based cascading failure model and propose a soft defense strategy to mitigate the damage from such cascading failures. In particular, we assign adjustable weights to individual links of a network and control the weight parameter. The information flow and the routing patterns in a network are

more »

... then controlled based on the assigned weights. The main idea of this work is to control the traffics on the network and we verify the effectiveness of the load redistribution for mitigating cascading failure. Numerical results imply that network robustness can be enhanced significantly using the relevant smart routing strategy, in which loads in the network are properly redistributed.