A New Survivability Measure for Military Communication Networks

A new measure for survivability of military communication networks based upon topological structures is presented in this paper. The proposed measure can be used to evaluato and enhance the survivability of military communication networks, which is illustrated through case studies. The computer simulation results have shown that the new measure can well reflect the survivability of networks. It can be used as a reliable criterion for estimating the survivability of networks and designing networks with high survivability . INTRODUCTION The measurement of survivability of military communication networks (MCNs) has been studied more than ten years. Many different measures chave been reported. Most existing survivability measures are based upon graph theory. In the earlier, it was quite simple by using either node connectivity or minimum cut tree. It has been increasingly realized that the measurement for survivability of MCNs is a complicated problem because the network is subject to deliberate and/or random attack. Since the destruction of a network is essentially a process, in which the nodes of the network are gradually destroyed until being completely disconnected, a survivability measure should be based upon such a process and its definition should reflect the survivability of the network during the entire destruction process. As the network may be damaged in many different hays, survivability measure can also be defined based upon different processes. The minimum cut tree is used in reference [2], but it results in complicated computations. In this paper, a new survivability measure for MCNs has been proposed to enhance accuracy and efficiency of survivability measure. SURVIVABILITY OF MCNs The survivability of an MCN is its ability to maintain communication among the nodes when it is subject to deliberate destructions. The proposed survivability measure made the following assumption: (1) The node of the network has only two status, damaged or undamaged. (2) The link between two nodes is wireless ( because most military communication networks are formed based upon mobile radio communication). Therefore the link damage is not taken into account. (3) Only one node is destroyed or removed every time, and this node is the most important one in the network, which means the worst case occurs every time. 7 he new measure for the survivability of MCNs is based upon the estimation of network connectivity in a complete destruction process, i.e. the network connectivity is summed with the node of network being removed one by one until the network becomes disconnected. Assuming the number of nodes in a given MCN G is n, the survivability measure (SM) for the network is defined as: