Disaster-Resilient Optical Network Survivability: A Comprehensive Survey

Abstract

Network survivability endeavors to ensure the uninterrupted provisioning of services by the network operators in case of a disaster event. Studies and news reports show that network failures caused by physical attacks and natural disasters have significant impacts on the optical networks. Such network failures may lead to a section of a network to cease to function, resulting in non-availability of services and may increase the congestion within the rest of the network. Therefore, fault tolerant and disaster-resilient optical networks have grasped the attention of the research community and have been a critical concern in network studies during the last decade. Several studies on protection and restoration techniques have been conducted to address the network component failures. This study reviews related previous research studies to critically discuss the issues regarding protection, restoration, cascading failures, disaster-based failures, and congestion-aware routing. We have also focused on the problem of simultaneous cascading failures (which may disturb the data traffic within a layer or disrupt the services at upper layers) along with their mitigating techniques, and disaster-aware network survivability. Since traffic floods and network congestion are pertinent problems, they have therefore been discussed in a separate section. In the end, we have highlighted some open issues in the disaster-resilient network survivability for research challenges and discussed them along with their possible solutions.

Communication Network Reliability under geographically correlated failures using Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis

“…The reliability of networks exposed to large disasters has grasped the research community's attention and has become a critical concern in network studies during the last decade (see surveys [8] and [22]). Looking at the damages caused by recent disasters, earthquakes top the list of those showing more significant impacts on communication networks, and simultaneously, they are the least predictable events [12].…”

“…As telecommunication networks become more widespread, higher service levels are needed. Coupled with these new service standards, interest in how large-scale disasters affect network reliability is becoming more critical in the study of reliability, see [7][8][9][10]. As mentioned in [11] the risk assessment of networks must go beyond the graph representation and account for the geographical region where they are embedded.…”

“…Network failures that arise from large-scale hazards such as earthquakes, wildfires, or extreme weather events show geographical failure correlations-outages due to this type of hazard present different behavior than a typical outage. Natural disasters provoke multiple simultaneous faults, failed components have spatiotemporal correlations, and are harder to repair (see [8,12]). The strong correlations these faults show made them unsuited for analysis under the independent failures assumption.…”

Communication Network Reliability under geographically correlated failures using Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis

“…As telecommunication networks become more widespread, higher service levels are needed. Coupled with these new service standards, interest in how largescale disasters a↵ect network reliability is becoming more critical in the study of reliability, see [7,8,9,10]. As mentioned in [11] the risk assessment of networks must go beyond the graph representation and account for the geographical region where they are embedded.…”

On Network Topology Augmentation for Global Connectivity under Regional Failures

“…Several insightful works were reported on how to model a regional failure event [1]- [9], [25], [26], most of which assume a given shape of an enclosing area for the considered disasters, such as a circular disk. These studies are essential for creating real-like failure scenarios; however, they do not contribute directly to enhancing the survivability of the networks.…”