Assessing the impact of geographically correlated network failures

Abstract

Abstract-Communication networks are vulnerable to natural disasters, such as earthquakes or floods, as well as to human attacks, such as an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. Such real-world events have geographical locations, and therefore, the geographical structure of the network graph affects the impact of these events. In this paper we focus on assessing the vulnerability of (geographical) networks to such disasters. In particular, we aim to identify the location of a disaster that would have the maximum effect on network capacity. We consider a geometric graph model in which nodes and links are geographically located on a plane. Specifically, we model the physical network as a bipartite graph (in the topological and geographical sense) and consider the set of all vertical line segment cuts. For that model, we develop a polynomial time algorithm for finding a worst possible cut. Our approach has the potential to be extended to general graphs and provides a promising new direction for network design to avert geographical disasters or attacks.

Erasure Codes-Based Storage-Aware Protocol For Preserving Cloud Data Under Correlation Failures

“…Some of the previous works interested in correlated failures mainly concentrate on (i) identifying the vulnerability of the system to such disasters [10,11] (e.g., estimating damage locations that have the maximum impact on network operation [10]), or the effect of such disasters [11], (ii) analyzing network capacity or evaluating its robustness [12], and measuring its reliability [8,13]. They are a few studies [14][15][16] stress how to distribute coded symbols of source SN to a subset of nodes in the network in order to ensure that each of them has one piece of data.…”

Assessing the Impact of Geographically Correlated Failures on Overlay-Based Data Dissemination

“…However, when the massive and wide geography disruption occurs, multiple physical nodes/links located within the region of the geographical event are damaged simultaneously. One related effort [23], explores the impact of the geographically correlated failures in order to identify vulnerable network locations that would have the maximum effect on the physical network capacity -this effort is limited to the vulnerabilities of physical nodes and does not model or address impact to the overlay networks, built on the physical networks. In contrast, our effort focuses on constructing an overlay network that is capable of disseminating information in a timely and reliable manner to the rest of the infrastructure (that has not failed) despite unexpected geographically correlated failures in the physical infrastructure.…”

Assessing the Vulnerabilities of Mission-Critical Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Some research has been conducted to understand the impact of region failures on wired backbone networks such as [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. On the other hand, the cut detection problem has been investigated by [19] and [20].…”