Resilience and survivability in communication networks: Strategies, principles, and survey of disciplines

A number of qualitative and quantitative terms are used to describe the performance of what has come to be known as information systems, networks or infrastructures. However, some of these terms either have overlapping meanings or contain ambiguities in their definitions presenting problems to those who attempt a rigorous evaluation of the performance of such systems. The phenomenon arises because the wide range of disciplines covered by the term information technology have developed their own distinct terminologies. This paper presents a systematic approach for determining common and complementary characteristics of five widely-used concepts, dependability, fault-tolerance, reliability, security, and survivability. The approach consists of comparing definitions, attributes, and evaluation measures for each of the five concepts and developing corresponding relations. Removing redundancies and clarifying ambiguities will help the mapping of broad user-specified requirements into objective performance parameters for analyzing and designing information infrastructures.

A comparative analysis of network dependability, fault-tolerance, reliability, security, and survivability

Network survivability modeling

Society has become dependent on information systems. As networks develop into large-scale systems, often critical to personal and business operations, survivability of these systems is imperative. While these systems continue to emerge and grow, answers to questions like: "What does survivability mean?", "How is survivability being measured?", and "How is survivability computed?" become very important. This paper summarizes the standard or lack of standard methods for defining and computing survivability while providing an easy to reference baseline of the current state. It also provides a template for defining survivability to facilitate subsequent research into computational quality attributes by using standard definitions. Where there are gaps or inconsistencies in current research and practice, assessments can be made to continue research and development in the areas most needed to develop taxonomy of survivability.

A definition for information system survivability

Network survivability reflects the ability of a network to continue to function during and after failures. Our purpose in this paper is to propose a quantitative approach to evaluate network survivability. We perceive the network survivability as a composite measure consisting of both network failure duration and failure impact on the network. A wireless ad-hoc network is analyzed as an example, and the excess packet loss due to failures (ELF) is taken as the survivability performance measure. To obtain ELF, we adopt a two phase approach consisting of the steady-state availability analysis and transient performance analysis. Assuming Markovian property for the system, this measure is obtained by solving a set of Markov models. By utilizing other analysis paradigms, our approach in this paper may also be applied to study the survivability performance of more complex systems.

Network survivability performance evaluation: a quantitative approach with applications in wireless ad-hoc networks

The article is based on the results of ANSI Technical Subcommittee T1A1 activities in the area of a general framework for telecommunication network survivability performance. The issues of users' expectations and requirements, outage categorization, and a framework for analysis of survivability techniques are discussed. Based on the survivability framework, models for network survivability assessment and analysis are considered, and performance measures are described. Examples illustrate the application of this framework in network design and planning. >

F.J. Kaudel

Papers

Framework for network survivability performance