Modeling and Analysis of Network Survivability under Attack Propagation

Survivability of networks has emerged as a fundamental concern for network design and operation. The network physical infrastructures are vulnerable to correlated faults from the natural disasters and malicious attack. Particularly, malicious attacks attract more attention rather than natural disasters recently. This paper investigates network survivability in the presence of network attack propagation. Especially, a continuous-time Markov chain model is used to characterize the network survivability performance during the transient period that starts from the attack occurrence, in the subsequent attack propagation, and until the network has been full recovery. On the basis of the model, we compare two different schemes with the transient reward measures. Furthermore, network survivability of each scheme is exemplified for four propagation and repair strategies. The numerical results indicate the scheme with immunized state is more survivable than the scheme without immunized state, which is not only helpful to the survivability of network design but also useful to choose the suitable repair strategies.