Quantifying Network Topology Robustness Under Budget Constraints

Published

June 24, 2013

Author(s)

Assane Gueye, Aron Lazska

Abstract

To design robust network topologies that resist strategic attacks, one must first be able to quantify robustness. In a recent line of research, the theory of network blocking games has been used to derive robustness metrics for topologies. A network blocking game takes as input the communication model and the topology of the network and models the strategic interactions between an adversary and the network as a two- player game. However, these previous works did not consider the budget constraints of the network operator. In this paper, we generalize blocking games by introducing a budget limit on the operator and propose two constraint formulations: the maximum and the expected cost constraints. For practical applications, the greatest challenge posed by blocking games is their computational complexity. Therefore, we show that the expected cost constraint formulation leads to games that can be solved efficiently and the maximum cost constraint leads to NP-hard problems.

Proceedings Title

The 43th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks

Conference Dates

June 24-27, 2013

Conference Location

Budapest

Conference Title

Performance and Dependability Symposium (PDS)

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

network topology robustness, robustness metrics, game theory, blocking games, computational complexity

Citation

Gueye, A. and Lazska, A. (2013), Quantifying Network Topology Robustness Under Budget Constraints, The 43th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, Budapest, -1, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=912970 (Accessed May 6, 2026)

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