Optimal Multiculture Network Design for Maximizing Resilience in the Face of Multiple Correlated Failures

Abstract

Current data networks are highly homogeneous because of management, economic, and interoperability reasons. This technological homogeneity introduces shared risks, where correlated failures may entirely disrupt the network operation and impair multiple nodes. In this paper, we tackle the problem of improving the resilience of homogeneous networks, which are affected by correlated node failures, through optimal multiculture network design. Correlated failures regarded here are modeled by SRNG events. We propose three sequential optimization problems for maximizing the network resilience by selecting as different node technologies, which do not share risks, and placing such nodes in a given topology. Results show that in the 75% of real-world network topologies analyzed here, our optimal multiculture design yields networks whose probability that a pair of nodes, chosen at random, are connected is 1, i.e., its ATTR metric is 1. To do so, our method efficiently trades off the network heterogeneity, the number of nodes per technology, and their clustered location in the network. In the remaining 25% of the topologies, whose average node degree was less than 2, such probability was at least 0.7867. This means that both multiculture design and topology connectivity are necessary to achieve network resilience.

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“…Results showed a clusterization pattern similar to the one achieved in [38]. The work in [41] is a considerable extension of [40], where the authors take into account shared vulnerabilities among available technologies. They raised the following problem: Considering a pool of technologies that might share vulnerabilities, what is the largest number of technologies that do not share vulnerabilities?…”

“…This event results in the impairment of nodes sharing the vulnerability and, potentially, the disconnection of the remaining functioning network. Several works focus on increasing network connectivity and robustness through diversity to tackle this problem, like [34]- [41]. In [34], Alleg et al proposed a combination of redundancy and diversity mechanisms to meet a target Service Function Chain availability in an NFV framework.…”

“…Besides connectivity metrics, the authors of [38]- [41] employed connected components metrics to analyze how well connected the network remained after failures. In [39], the authors proposed to design the network from scratch.…”

“…Both works [38], [39] considered no difference in variant's reliability. Prieto et al [40], [41] introduced a vulnerability index, which accounts for the different reliability of each variant. The network diversification problem in [40] was decomposed into two subproblems.…”

“…However, works like [24], [25], and the vulnerability disclosure databases [9]- [13] reveal that apparently unrelated implementations could share common risks due to code reutilization, third-party software applications, etc. In the literature, other authors have considered shared vulnerabilities, such as [14], [31]- [33], [37], [41]- [43]. Some authors take into account shared vulnerabilities assessing the number of common vulnerabilities disclosed between the available technologies.…”