Society increasingly depends on networks in general and the Internet in particular for just about every aspect of daily life. As the Internet increases its reach in global scope, services traditionally implemented on separate networks are increasingly subsumed by the Internet, either as overlays, via gatewayed access, or as a replacement for legacy networks. With this growing dependence on and integration of services in the Internet, come increasingly severe consequences of disruption in networked services.
This collaborative project conducts systemic research on fundamental understanding on network design for massive failures or attacks such as power blackouts and natural disasters, as well as attacks against the physical, and protocol infrastructure by intelligent adversaries. The novelty of the work is a systemic approach to designing resilient and survivable networks by developing a network topology generation, design, and analysis methodology that incorporates a number of critical factors, with an optimization formulation that incorporates geodiversity. Methodologies will assess vulnerabilities of existing networks and to propose modifications to make them more resilient and survivable. Furthermore, a novel approach is taken to understand resilient transport for massive failures in a traffic-engineering framework so that applications can exploit the structural diversity introduced in the network.
Broader Impact: The research aims to gain new understanding on how to design and deploy resilient networks, with emphasis on surviving massive disruptions as a result of large-scale disasters and coordinated attacks. The specific techniques and mechanisms may be applied to improve the resilience of the current Internet and its parts to better serve society, as well as to help drive the deign of the Future Internet. The research will advance the state-of-the art in network science and engineering. The principal investigators will make all results, including analytic and simulation models and source code, publicly available to the research community on a public wiki. Results will be disseminated in conferences, journal papers, and books. The project will support the research of two Ph.D. students with an effort to recruit students from under-represented groups. The project results will contribute to the education of other students, with direct input and class project participation in several courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, including a senior undergraduate and graduate special topics courses on Science of Communication Networks and Resilient and Survivable Networks at both The University of Kansas and the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
