Fundamental limits of failure identifiability by Boolean Network Tomography

Boolean network tomography is a powerful tool to infer the state (working/failed) of individual nodes from path-level measurements obtained by egde-nodes. We consider the problem of optimizing the capability of identifying network failures through the design of monitoring schemes. Finding an optimal solution is NP-hard and a large body of work has been devoted to heuristic approaches providing lower bounds. Unlike previous works, we provide upper bounds on the maximum number of identifiable nodes, given the number of monitoring paths and different constraints on the network topology, the routing scheme, and the maximum path length. The proposed upper bounds represent a fundamental limit on the identifiability of failures via Boolean network tomography. This analysis provides insights on how to design topologies and related monitoring schemes to achieve the maximum identifiability under various network settings. Through analysis and experiments we demonstrate the tightness of the bounds and efficacy of the design insights for engineered as well as real network

Multimodal Multiple Federated Feature Construction Method for IoT Environments

The fast development of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and applications has led to vast data collection, potentially containing irrelevant, noisy, or redundant features that degrade learning model performance. These collected data can be processed on either end-user devices (clients) or edge/cloud server. Feature construction is a pre-processing technique that can generate discriminative features and reveal hidden relationships between original features within a dataset, leading to improved performance and reduced computational complexity of learning models. Moreover, the communication cost between clients and edge/cloud server can be minimized in situations where a dataset needs to be transmitted for further processing. In this paper, the first federated feature construction (FFC) method called multimodal multiple FFC (MMFFC) is proposed by using multimodal optimization and gravitational search programming algorithm. This is a collaborative method for constructing multiple high-level features without sharing clients' datasets to enhance the trade-off between accuracy of the trained model and overall communication cost of the system, while also reducing computational complexity of the learning model. We analyze and compare the accuracy-cost trade-off of two scenarios, namely, 1) MMFFC federated learning (FL), using vanilla FL with pre-processed datasets on clients and 2) MMFFC centralized learning, transferring pre-processed datasets to an edge server and using centralized learning model. The results on three datasets for the first scenario and eight datasets for the second one demonstrate that the proposed method can reduce the size of datasets for about 60$\%$, thereby reducing communication cost and improving accuracy of the learning models tested on almost all datasets.Comment: This paper has been accepted at 2023 IEEE Global Communications Conference: IoT and Sensor Network

Progressive damage assessment and network recovery after massive failures

After a massive scale failure, the assessment of damages to communication networks requires local interventions and remote monitoring. While previous works on network recovery require complete knowledge of damage extent, we address the problem of damage assessment and critical service restoration in a joint manner. We propose a polynomial algorithm called Centrality based Damage Assessment and Recovery (CeDAR) which performs a joint activity of failure monitoring and restoration of network components. CeDAR works under limited availability of recovery resources and optimizes service recovery over time. We modified two existing approaches to the problem of network recovery to make them also able to exploit incremental knowledge of the failure extent. Through simulations we show that CeDAR outperforms the previous approaches in terms of recovery resource utilization and accumulative flow over time of the critical service

Influence Spread in Two-Layer Interdependent Networks: Designed Single-Layer or Random Two-Layer Initial Spreaders?

Influence spread in multi-layer interdependent networks (M-IDN) has been studied in the last few years; however, prior works mostly focused on the spread that is initiated in a single layer of an M-IDN. In real world scenarios, influence spread can happen concurrently among many or all components making up the topology of an M-IDN. This paper investigates the effectiveness of different influence spread strategies in M-IDNs by providing a comprehensive analysis of the time evolution of influence propagation given different initial spreader strategies. For this study we consider a two-layer interdependent network and a general probabilistic threshold influence spread model to evaluate the evolution of influence spread over time. For a given coupling scenario, we tested multiple interdependent topologies, composed of layers A and B, against four cases of initial spreader selection: (1) random initial spreaders in A, (2) random initial spreaders in both A and B, (3) targeted initial spreaders using degree centrality in A, and (4) targeted initial spreaders using degree centrality in both A and B. Our results indicate that the effectiveness of influence spread highly depends on network topologies, the way they are coupled, and our knowledge of the network structure — thus an initial spread starting in only A can be as effective as initial spread starting in both A and B concurrently. Similarly, random initial spread in multiple layers of an interdependent system can be more severe than a comparable initial spread in a single layer. Our results can be easily extended to different types of event propagation in multi-layer interdependent networks such as information/misinformation propagation in online social networks, disease propagation in offline social networks, and failure/attack propagation in cyber-physical systems