Designing resilient telecommunications networks

Abstract

How can telecommunications networks be designed to withstand deliberate attacks by intelligent agents, possibly working in teams? This chapter continues discussing quantitative risk assessment (QRA) for systems with intelligent adversaries by reviewing progress in methods for designing communications networks that are resilient to attacks – that is, that are able to quickly and automatically reroute traffic around affected areas to maintain communications with little or no interruption. Current network architectures, routing and restoration protocols, and design methods already suffice to protect networks against the loss of any single link or node, so the main focus for defending against deliberate attacks is on the design of networks that can reroute traffic even when multiple simultaneous failures occur