Of dual-core networks during rare events

Abstract

Telecommunication networks are evolving to become more reliable, but many networks remain vulnerable to widespread systemic failures. Reliability of individual components has improved and some networks can achieve availabilities on the order of 0.99999. However, the routing technologies used by these networks, like Open Shortest Path First and Border Gateway Protocol can create system-wide vulnerabilities. Some of the vulnerabilities include widespread outages such as earthquakes and floods, unintentional device mis-configurations, and hacker attacks. One of the leading-edge architectures to address system-wide outages is the use of a dual-core backbone, which uses two independent long-haul cores to connect the network's sites. The network is designed to tolerate the failure of a single core and leave the network fully functional. This work presents an OPNET simulation model of a dual-core architecture. This model predicts the restoral time of various network outages for different device configuration options and different topology options.