SDN Testbed for Evaluation of Large Exo-Atmospheric EMP Attacks

Large-scale nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks and natural disasters can cause extensive network failures across wide geographic regions. Although operational networks are designed to handle most single or dual faults, recent efforts have also focused on more capable multi-failure disaster recovery schemes. Concurrently, advances in software-defined networking (SDN) technologies have delivered highly-adaptable frameworks for implementing new and improved service provisioning and recovery paradigms in real-world settings. Hence this study leverages these new innovations to develop a robust disaster recovery (counter-EMP) framework for large backbone networks. Detailed findings from an experimental testbed study are also presented

Technology-related disasters:a survey towards disaster-resilient software defined networks

Resilience against disaster scenarios is essential to network operators, not only because of the potential economic impact of a disaster but also because communication networks form the basis of crisis management. COST RECODIS aims at studying measures, rules, techniques and prediction mechanisms for different disaster scenarios. This paper gives an overview of different solutions in the context of technology-related disasters. After a general overview, the paper focuses on resilient Software Defined Networks

Maximally spatial-disjoint lightpaths in optical networks

Lightpaths enable end-to-end all-optical transmission between network nodes. For survivable routing, traffic is often carried on a primary lightpath, and rerouted to another disjointed backup lightpath in case of the failure of the primary lightpath. Though both lightpaths can be physically disjointed, they can still fail simultaneously if a disaster affects them simultaneously on the physical plane. Hence, we propose a routing algorithm for provisioning a pair of link-disjoint lightpaths between two network nodes such that the minimum spatial distance between them (while disregarding safe regions) is maximized. Through means of simulation, we show that our algorithm can provide higher survivability against spatial-based simultaneous link failures (due to the maximized spatial distance)

Disaster-resilient communication networks:Principles and best practices

Communication network failures that are caused by disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes and cyber-attacks, can have significant economic and societal impact. To address this problem, the research community has been investigating approaches to network resilience for several years. However, aside from well-established techniques, many of these solutions have not found their way into operational environments. The RECODIS COST Action aims to address this shortcoming by providing solutions that are tailored to specific types of challenge, whilst considering the wider socio-economic issues that are associated with their deployment. To support this goal, in this paper, we present an overview of some of the foundational related work on network resilience, covering topics such as measuring resilience and resilient network architectures, amongst others. In addition, we provide insights into current operational best practices for ensuring the resilience of carrier-grade communication networks. The aim of this paper is to support the goals of the EU COST Action RECODIS and the wider research community in engineering more resilient communication networks

Disaster Resilient Optical Core Networks

During the past few years, the number of catastrophic disasters has increased and its impact sometimes incapacitates the infrastructures within a region. The communication network infrastructure is one of the affected systems during these events. Thus, building a resilient network backbone is essential due to the big role of networks during disaster recovery operations. In this thesis, the research efforts in building a disaster-resilient network are reviewed and open issues related to building disaster-resilient networks are discussed. Large size disasters not necessarily impact the communication networks, but instead it can stimulate events that cause network performance degradation. In this regard, two open challenges that arise after disasters are considered one is the short-term capacity exhaustion and the second is the power outage. First, the post-disaster traffic floods phenomena is considered. The impact of the traffic floods on the optical core network performance is studied. Five mitigation approaches are proposed to serve these floods and minimise the incurred blocking. The proposed approaches explore different technologies such as excess or overprovisioned capacity exploitation, traffic filtering, protection paths rerouting, rerouting all traffic and finally using the degrees of freedom offered by differentiated services. The mitigation approaches succeeded in reducing the disaster induced traffic blocking. Second, advance reservation provisioning in an energy-efficient approach is developed. Four scenarios are considered to minimise power consumption. The scenarios exploit the flexibility provided by the sliding-window advance reservation requests. This flexibility is studied through scheduling and rescheduling scenarios. The proposed scenarios succeeded in minimising the consumed power. Third, the sliding-window flexibility is exploited for the objective of minimising network blocking during post-disaster traffic floods. The scheduling and rescheduling scenarios are extended to overcome the capacity exhaustion and improve the network blocking. The proposed schemes minimised the incurred blocking during traffic floods by exploiting sliding window. Fourth, building blackout resilient networks is proposed. The network performance during power outages is evaluated. A remedy approach is suggested for maximising network lifetime during blackouts. The approach attempts to reduce the required backup power supply while minimising network outages due to limited energy production. The results show that the mitigation approach succeeds in keeping the network alive during a blackout while minimising the required backup power

Modelling and Design of Resilient Networks under Challenges

Communication networks, in particular the Internet, face a variety of challenges that can disrupt our daily lives resulting in the loss of human lives and significant financial costs in the worst cases. We define challenges as external events that trigger faults that eventually result in service failures. Understanding these challenges accordingly is essential for improvement of the current networks and for designing Future Internet architectures. This dissertation presents a taxonomy of challenges that can help evaluate design choices for the current and Future Internet. Graph models to analyse critical infrastructures are examined and a multilevel graph model is developed to study interdependencies between different networks. Furthermore, graph-theoretic heuristic optimisation algorithms are developed. These heuristic algorithms add links to increase the resilience of networks in the least costly manner and they are computationally less expensive than an exhaustive search algorithm. The performance of networks under random failures, targeted attacks, and correlated area-based challenges are evaluated by the challenge simulation module that we developed. The GpENI Future Internet testbed is used to conduct experiments to evaluate the performance of the heuristic algorithms developed

Robust Data Center Network Design using Space Division Multiplexing

With the ever-increasing demand for data transmission in our generation where Internet and cloud concepts play a vital role, it has become essential that we handle data in a most efficient way. A possible solution to overcome the capacity crunch problem which is so evident in future, is applications of Space Division Multiplexing, where we explore the remaining unused domain that is the spatial domain. Space Division Multiplexing using multi-core fibers (MCFs), and few-mode fibers (FMFs) has been studied in our work to enhance the data-carrying capacity of optical fibers while minimizing the transmission cost per bit. The objective of our work is to develop a path protection scheme to handle communication requests in data center (DC) networks using elastic optical networking and space division multiplexing (SDM). Our approach to this problem is to 1) determine a dedicated primary and backup path, 2) possible allocation of spectrum using the flex-grid fixed-SDM model, 3) choose the best possible modulation format to minimize the number of subcarriers needed for data transfer, 4) measure the cost of the resources required to handle the new requests. We propose to evaluate the developed Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation based on this scheme, considering the possibility of disasters. We study the impact of the design on the cost of the solution, hence explore whether it promotes significant resource savings

Performance Measures to Assess Resiliency and Efficiency of Transit Systems

Transit agencies are interested in assessing the short-, mid-, and long-term performance of infrastructure with the objective of enhancing resiliency and efficiency. This report addresses three distinct aspects of New Jersey’s Transit System: 1) resiliency of bridge infrastructure, 2) resiliency of public transit systems, and 3) efficiency of transit systems with an emphasis on paratransit service. This project proposed a conceptual framework to assess the performance and resiliency for bridge structures in a transit network before and after disasters utilizing structural health monitoring (SHM), finite element (FE) modeling and remote sensing using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR). The public transit systems in NY/NJ were analyzed based on their vulnerability, resiliency, and efficiency in recovery following a major natural disaster