A New Approach to Optical Networks Security: Attack-Aware Routing and Wavelength Assignment

Security issues and attack management in transparent wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks have become of prime importance to network operators due to the high data rates involved and the vulnerabilities associated with transparency. Deliberate physical-layer attacks, such as high-powered jamming, can seriously degrade network performance and must be dealt with efficiently. While most approaches are focused on the developing fast detection and reaction mechanisms triggered in case of an attack, we propose a novel approach to help deal with these issues in the network planning and provisioning process as a prevention mechanism. Namely, we propose to route lightpaths in such a way as to minimize the potential damage caused by various physical-layer attacks. We present a new objective criterion for the routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) problem, which we call the maximum Lightpath Attack Radius (maxLAR), and formulate the routing subproblem as an integer linear program (ILP). We test it on small networks to get an insight into its complexity and compare it to a formulation that minimizes congestion. Results indicate that our formulation achieves significantly better results for the maxLAR while obtaining near-optimal or optimal congestion in all cases. For larger networks, we propose a tabu search algorithm for attack-aware lightpath routing, in combination with an existing graph-coloring algorithm for wavelength assignment. Testing and comparing with existing approaches from literature indicate its superiority with respect to the maxLAR and average lightpath load, albeit at the expense of somewhat higher congestion. However, this is justified with the obtained improvement in network security.