The resilience of WDM networks to probabilistic geographical failures

Abstract

Abstract-Telecommunications networks, and in particular optical WDM networks, are vulnerable to large-scale failures of their physical infrastructure, resulting from physical attacks (such as an Electromagnetic Pulse attack) or natural disasters (such as solar flares, earthquakes, and floods). Such events happen at specific geographical locations and disrupt specific parts of the network but their effects are not deterministic. Therefore, we provide a unified framework to model the network vulnerability when the event has a probabilistic nature, defined by an arbitrary probability density function. Our framework captures scenarios with a number of simultaneous attacks, in which network components consist of several dependent subcomponents, and in which either a 1+1 or a 1:1 protection plan is in place. We use computational geometric tools to provide efficient algorithms to identify vulnerable points within the network under various metrics. Then, we obtain numerical results for specific backbone networks, thereby demonstrating the applicability of our algorithms to real-world scenarios. Our novel approach allows for identifying locations which require additional protection efforts (e.g., equipment shielding). Overall, the paper demonstrates that using computational geometric techniques can significantly contribute to our understanding of network resilience.

Enhancing Network Robustness via Shielding

“…Geographical failure models can be used to model real world disasters and attacks [2], [3], [21]. In this paper, we consider the disk failure model, which captures the effect of electromagnetic pulse attacks.…”

“…Previous research considers geographical failures [2], [3] and general failures [4], [5] to assess the robustness of the network. Geographical failure models capture the effects of natural disasters and physical attacks; e.g., all links in the failure region are destroyed.…”

An Overview of Algorithms for Network Survivability

“…Work on multilink geographic failures has mostly focused on determining the geographic max-flow and min-cut values of a network under geographic failures of circular shape (e.g., Sen et al [145], Agarwal et al [146], and Neumayer et al [147]). Trajanovski et al [148] proved that, the problem of finding two region-disjoint paths is NP-hard, and they proposed a heuristic for it.…”

Diverse routing in multi-domain optical networks with correlated and probabilistic multi-failures

“…Specifically, the former types analyze the impact of potential geographical/regional failures on the given network topologies. For example, [13]- [15] study network vulnerability under various failure models and identify critical locations yielding maximum capacity or connectivity disruption. These findings can be used to improve the design and maintenance of fault-tolerant network infrastructures.…”