Attack-Aware Dedicated Path Protection in Optical Networks

Abstract

Due to the high data rates in optical networks, physical-layer attacks targeting service degradation, such as power jamming, can potentially lead to large data and revenue losses. Conventional network survivability approaches which establish link-disjoint working and backup paths to protect from component faults may not provide adequate protection for such attacks. Namely, the working and the backup paths, although link-disjoint, might both be affected by a single attack scenario due to specific attack propagation characteristics. To enhance the existing survivability approaches, we utilize the concept of an attack group (AG) which incorporates these characteristics to identify connections which can simultaneously be affected by a single attack. We apply this concept to dedicated path protection (DPP) and develop attack-aware DPP (AA-DPP) approaches which aim to establish AG-disjoint primary and backup paths in a cost-effective manner. We provide a two-step ILP formulation for the routing and wavelength assignment of the working and backup paths, as well as a heuristic for larger problem instances. Numerical results indicate that the proposed approaches provide dedicated path protection schemes with enhanced attack protection without using more resources (i.e., wavelengths, average path lengths) than standard DPP methods.