Recovery and Resource Allocation Strategies to Maximize Mobile Network Survivability by Using Game Theories and Optimization Techniques

Pei-Yu Chen,Frank Yeong-Sung Lin

doi:10.1155/2013/207141

Abstract

With more and more mobile device users, an increasingly important and critical issue is how to efficiently evaluate mobile network survivability. In this paper, a novel metric called Average Degree of Disconnectivity (Average DOD) is proposed, in which the concept of probability is calculated by the contest success function. The DOD metric is used to evaluate the damage degree of the network, where the larger the value of the Average DOD, the more the damage degree of the network. A multiround network attack-defense scenario as a mathematical model is used to support network operators to predict all the strategies both cyber attacker and network defender would likely take. In addition, the Average DOD would be used to evaluate the damage degree of the network. In each round, the attacker could use the attack resources to launch attacks on the nodes of the target network. Meanwhile, the network defender could reallocate its existing resources to recover compromised nodes and allocate defense resources to protect the survival nodes of the network. In the approach to solving this problem, the “gradient method” and “game theory” are adopted to find the optimal resource allocation strategies for both the cyber attacker and mobile network defender.

Highlights

Network security problems are often challenging given that the growing complexity and interconnected nature of IT systems lead to a limited capability of observation and control
Insofar as there is not a precisely defined physical boundary of the mobile network, as soon as an adversary comes in the radio range of a node, he can communicate with that node and launch a malicious attack on it [2]; these attacks include eavesdropping, phishing, war driving, and denial of service (DoS) attack [3]
The experiment shows that when the defender has the ability to recover compromised nodes (NR1 and NR3), the Average degree of disconnectivity (DOD) value is less than when the defender cannot recover any compromised nodes (NR2)

Summary

Introduction

Network security problems are often challenging given that the growing complexity and interconnected nature of IT systems lead to a limited capability of observation and control. This is especially the case for mobile networks, in which the cycle time of decision making is reduced from enterprise having access to real-time data. As the enterprise systems are widely relayed on mobile networks, the services are disrupted whenever the network suffers a disruption, such as from physical damage or malicious attacks. It is critical for an enterprise to evaluate and allocate its resources to protect it assets, as well as to be able to continuously provide service

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion