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Network design methods for mitigation of intentional attacks in scale-free networks

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Abstract

Network robustness and network reliability are important issues in the design of Internet Service Providers’ topologies. In this paper, we examine the structural characteristics of network topologies that affect robustness and reliability. We examine the interplay between the structural characteristics of network topologies and the resource capacity over-provisioning strategies when the network breakdowns subject to practical constraints (router technology) and economic considerations (link costs). We study the robustness of the Internet connectivity under node intentional harmful attack using two attacks strategies: static degree-based and static load-based. We find that the robustness of network topologies is affected by the variation of their structural characteristics. In our proposed approach, we show that highly-heterogeneous topologies have less robustness compared with lightly-heterogeneous topologies. The observations from the robustness study provide us useful insights for proposing multiple efficient preventive resource capacity over-provisioning strategies for mitigation of intentional attacks. The proposed strategies utilize the structural properties by calculating the excess traffic in case of single global cascading failure for each node and measure its influence on the other nodes as well as locally. The results show that our proposed strategies can significantly enhance the robustness and increase the resilience of network topology. We also show that highly-heterogeneous topologies have high resilience compared with lightly-heterogeneous topologies. By using real data from the Sprint network at the router level, we provide further empirical evidence in support of the proposed approach.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Systems Engineering, National Research Center, Dokki, Giza, Egypt

    Walid K. Ghamry

  2. Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt, 12613

    Khaled M. F. Elsayed

Authors
  1. Walid K. Ghamry
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  2. Khaled M. F. Elsayed
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Correspondence to Khaled M. F. Elsayed.

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Ghamry, W.K., Elsayed, K.M.F. Network design methods for mitigation of intentional attacks in scale-free networks. Telecommun Syst 49, 313–327 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11235-010-9375-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11235-010-9375-2

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