Enhancing Cyber Resilience Through Traffic Generation Patterns in Complex Networks: A Study on Cascading Failures

Network resilience is the capacity of a network to maintain and restore its fundamental operations during or after a failure. This paper investigates the resilience of communication networks with heterogeneous nodes, with host nodes that generate and receive packets and routers that only forward pac...

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Main Authors: B. Aymar Le Pere Tchimwa, Jean-Pierre Lienou, Wilson Ejuh Geh, Frederica Nelson, Sachin Shetty, Charles Kamhoua
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2024-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
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Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10746862/
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author B. Aymar Le Pere Tchimwa
Jean-Pierre Lienou
Wilson Ejuh Geh
Frederica Nelson
Sachin Shetty
Charles Kamhoua
author_facet B. Aymar Le Pere Tchimwa
Jean-Pierre Lienou
Wilson Ejuh Geh
Frederica Nelson
Sachin Shetty
Charles Kamhoua
author_sort B. Aymar Le Pere Tchimwa
collection DOAJ
description Network resilience is the capacity of a network to maintain and restore its fundamental operations during or after a failure. This paper investigates the resilience of communication networks with heterogeneous nodes, with host nodes that generate and receive packets and routers that only forward packets. We focus on how traffic generation patterns, defined as the distribution of data packet creation across hosts, affect network resilience. While previous studies identified optimal host placements that balance traffic loads and enhance network performance, this research explores how traffic generation patterns influence network resilience, particularly during cascading failures, where the failure of one node triggers subsequent failures across the network. To address this issue, we model our networks as unweighted, undirected graphs consisting of non-mobile nodes and use the host survival rate—the percentage of functional hosts after a failure—as the network’s critical function. Assuming the network includes a host-based restoration process as an inherent recovery mechanism that initiates after an incident, we compare the resilience of different network topologies (scale-free, regular lattice, and Erdőos-Rényi), by conducting computational experiments to assess the effect of various traffic generation patterns by placing hosts on high-degree, low-degree, or randomly selected nodes. This is done by developing a discrete mathematical framework for measuring cyber resilience as an integral of the critical function in discrete time steps. Our findings indicate that when the hosts have multiple connections to other nodes, it significantly enhances network resilience. Notably, scale-free networks demonstrate more than twice the resilience compared to other topologies, showing a host survival rate improvement from 0.2093 to 0.4498 when hosts are positioned on high-degree nodes as opposed to being placed randomly.
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spelling doaj-art-b4f74afaf07a4728bc3db089582abe0f2025-08-20T02:14:44ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362024-01-011216415116416310.1109/ACCESS.2024.349323310746862Enhancing Cyber Resilience Through Traffic Generation Patterns in Complex Networks: A Study on Cascading FailuresB. Aymar Le Pere Tchimwa0https://orcid.org/0009-0001-7820-4471Jean-Pierre Lienou1Wilson Ejuh Geh2Frederica Nelson3Sachin Shetty4https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8789-0610Charles Kamhoua5https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2169-5975Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Dschang, Dschang, CameroonDepartment of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Dschang, Dschang, CameroonDepartment of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Dschang, Dschang, CameroonNetwork Security Branch, DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, MD, USADepartment of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Old Dominion University, Boulder, VA, USANetwork Security Branch, DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, MD, USANetwork resilience is the capacity of a network to maintain and restore its fundamental operations during or after a failure. This paper investigates the resilience of communication networks with heterogeneous nodes, with host nodes that generate and receive packets and routers that only forward packets. We focus on how traffic generation patterns, defined as the distribution of data packet creation across hosts, affect network resilience. While previous studies identified optimal host placements that balance traffic loads and enhance network performance, this research explores how traffic generation patterns influence network resilience, particularly during cascading failures, where the failure of one node triggers subsequent failures across the network. To address this issue, we model our networks as unweighted, undirected graphs consisting of non-mobile nodes and use the host survival rate—the percentage of functional hosts after a failure—as the network’s critical function. Assuming the network includes a host-based restoration process as an inherent recovery mechanism that initiates after an incident, we compare the resilience of different network topologies (scale-free, regular lattice, and Erdőos-Rényi), by conducting computational experiments to assess the effect of various traffic generation patterns by placing hosts on high-degree, low-degree, or randomly selected nodes. This is done by developing a discrete mathematical framework for measuring cyber resilience as an integral of the critical function in discrete time steps. Our findings indicate that when the hosts have multiple connections to other nodes, it significantly enhances network resilience. Notably, scale-free networks demonstrate more than twice the resilience compared to other topologies, showing a host survival rate improvement from 0.2093 to 0.4498 when hosts are positioned on high-degree nodes as opposed to being placed randomly.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10746862/Network traffic patterncyber resiliencekey performance parametercomplex networkcascading failure
spellingShingle B. Aymar Le Pere Tchimwa
Jean-Pierre Lienou
Wilson Ejuh Geh
Frederica Nelson
Sachin Shetty
Charles Kamhoua
Enhancing Cyber Resilience Through Traffic Generation Patterns in Complex Networks: A Study on Cascading Failures
IEEE Access
Network traffic pattern
cyber resilience
key performance parameter
complex network
cascading failure
title Enhancing Cyber Resilience Through Traffic Generation Patterns in Complex Networks: A Study on Cascading Failures
title_full Enhancing Cyber Resilience Through Traffic Generation Patterns in Complex Networks: A Study on Cascading Failures
title_fullStr Enhancing Cyber Resilience Through Traffic Generation Patterns in Complex Networks: A Study on Cascading Failures
title_full_unstemmed Enhancing Cyber Resilience Through Traffic Generation Patterns in Complex Networks: A Study on Cascading Failures
title_short Enhancing Cyber Resilience Through Traffic Generation Patterns in Complex Networks: A Study on Cascading Failures
title_sort enhancing cyber resilience through traffic generation patterns in complex networks a study on cascading failures
topic Network traffic pattern
cyber resilience
key performance parameter
complex network
cascading failure
url https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10746862/
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