Best Effort Broadcast under Cascading Failures in Interdependent Networks

Abstract

We present a novel study of reliable broadcast in interdependent networks, in which the failures in one network may cascade to another network. In particular, we focus on the interdependency between the communication network and the power grid network, where the power grid depends on the communication network for control and the communication network depends on the grid for power. In this paper, we propose a best effort broadcast algorithm to handle crash failures in the communication network that may cause cascading failures, where all the correct nodes deliver the message if the sender is correct. At the core of our work is a fully distributed algorithm for the nodes to analyze cascading failures prior to their presence so that failures can be handled accordingly. Our evaluation results show that the algorithm handles cascading failures with little overhead.