Security in all-optical networks: Failure and attack avoidance using self-organization

Abstract

While transparent optical networks become more and more popular as the basis of the Next Generation Internet (NGI) infrastructure, such networks raise many security issues, which do not exist in traditional optoelectronic networks. The existing protection schemes which rely heavily on fault detection due to the use of network monitoring performed by the use of optoelectronic conversion at the switching nodes, is not sufficient to provide security assurance for all optical networks which lack the massive use of optoelectronic monitoring and require timely protection from malicious sabotage as well as inadvertent faults. In order to increase the security of future networks, them will need to use reactive mechanisms and self-organize through multipath routing (MPR) to protect themselves from potential failures caused by malicious new attacks and ordinary reliability problems. If we make the analogy to the human immunization systempsilas primary defense mechanism, MPR will act as the primary defense mechanism reacting timely to network problems and evolving based on network information. In this paper we are proposing the use MPR as an instinct immediate network reaction to failures and attacks in transparent networks; after the nodes transmit the data and causes of failure are classified, better self organized decisions can be used based on changing routing output priorities to reach destination.