Communication networks are prone to attacks from adversaries. The attacker tries to sabotage nodes in the network that would cause maximum loss of connectivity. In this work, the student would compare different attack strategies based on centrality measures, state-of-the-art approaches, minimal cut sets, and minimal path sets. The goal is to provide guidelines to network operators regarding which nodes are most important to the seamless functioning of the network.

Prerequisites

In this context, a domain is a geographical region. The nodes on the edge of a domain are called border nodes. We assume that there is a controller (like in SDN) to control the interdomain traffic. However, domain operators do not like to share information about their network topologies, node or link characteristics, availabilities, etc. They can only share abstract numbers that can not be reverse-engineered to obtain any useful information. With this restriction, the interdomain controller needs to make routing decisions to route interdomain traffic.

This research internship requires a thorough literature survey of existing techniques in multidomain routing for reliability and understanding the gaps. Furthermore, the student is expected to implement a multi-domain routing strategy and test it with different topologies.

Prerequisites

Hyper-connected meshes are a growing idea that improves the connectivity in core networks. This approach adds several links to the existing core network to make it more dense and increases the number of simple paths in the network. There are several approaches to add these links to the network. In this work, we compare the robustness of the different approaches on different topologies and identify the best approach to add links in terms of robustness. 

We already have our tool to develop robustness surfaces for the given network. The student is expected to use this tool and compare the robustness of different approaches and make meaningful inferences.

[1] Manzano, M., Sahneh, F., Scoglio, C., Calle, E. and Marzo, J.L., 2014. Robustness surfaces of complex networks. Scientific reports, 4(1), p.6133.

[2] Rueda, D.F., Calle, E. and Marzo, J.L., 2017. Robustness comparison of 15 real telecommunication networks: Structural and centrality measurements. Journal of Network and Systems Management, 25(2), pp.269-289.

This work is in collaboration with Christofer Vásquez from the University of the Bundeswehr, Munich.

Prerequisites

The interdependence of communication networks and electrical power grids is a topic of discussion in recent times. Though researchers try to map the interdependence, there are no topology-level frameworks that have data on both communication networks and electrical power grids. This work aims to generate such topology-level frameworks to publish as open-source to encourage research along this direction.

Prerequisites

A cut set of a flow is a set of components when removed, cause the flow to fail. A cut set is minimal if it cannot be further reduced. Based on minimal cut sets for flows, this work aims to investigate a potential centrality metric to determine the importance of particular nodes in the network. 

Prerequisites

Currently, we have developed two tools for Reliability Block Diagram Evaluation, one tool for Robustness Surface generation, and one script to generate minimal cut sets for flows. From the sovereignty perspective, we have the three metrics, (i) Path set diversity score, (ii) Cut set coloring score, (iii) Cut set diversity score. In this work, we consolidate all these dependability oriented works into a unified demo packaged in a GUI, aimed to be a part of our future demos. The role of the student is to build the GUI from scratch and integrate the previous individual tools, develop new scripts to generate fault trees, make adequate plots, and add necessary features to suit the demo-GUI.

Prerequisites

Reliability Block Diagrams (RBDs) are visual aids that help evaluate the availability of a system. In communication networks, the availability evaluation is often computation and memory-intensive owing to the large size of the topologies. Hence, we investigate a novel approach of evaluating RBDs using minimal path sets.

Prerequisites