Topology Design of Undersea Cables Considering Survivability Under Major Disasters

Abstract

Unpredictable natural disasters and human interventions could pose significant threats to the undersea cables of modern telecommunication networks. In this paper, we consider the network topology of the undersea cables and propose a rectangular network to prevent all the cable links from being damaged simultaneously. An optimization problem on the plane is formulated to minimize the total cost under the survivability constraints. The spherical geometry of the earth's surface complicate the problem, however, this paper provides guidance to the real world problem, and a methodology for discussing it.

The resilience of WDM networks to probabilistic geographical failures

“…To the best of our knowledge, geographically correlated failures have been considered only in a few papers and under very specific assumptions [17], [24]- [26], [31], [37]. In most cases, the assumption is that the failures of the components are deterministic and that there is a single failure.…”

“…During a crisis, telecommunication is essential to facilitate the control of physically remote agents, provide connections between emergency response personnel, and eventually enable reconstitution of societal functions. However, telecommunication networks rely heavily on physical infrastructure (such as optical fibers, amplifiers, routers, and switches), making them vulnerable to physical attacks, such as Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attacks, as well as natural disasters, such as solar flares, earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods [8], [13], [14], [36], [37]. Physical attacks or disasters affect a specific geographical area and will result in failures of neighboring components.…”

“…This emerging field of geographically correlated failures has started gaining attention only recently [2], [17], [24]- [26], [31], [32], [37]. However, unlike most of the recent work in this field, we focus on probabilistic attacks and on a number of simultaneous attacks.…”

“…1 We consider arbitrary probability functions (with constant description complexity) and develop algorithms that obtain the expected vulnerability of the network. Furthermore, while [17], [24]- [26], [31], [32], [37] consider only a single event, our algorithms allow the assessment of the effects of several simultaneous events.…”

Assessing the Vulnerabilities of Mission-Critical Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Some research has been conducted to understand the impact of region failures on wired backbone networks such as [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. On the other hand, the cut detection problem has been investigated by [19] and [20].…”