Towards Resilient Networks Using Programmable Networking Technologies

Resilience is arguably the most important property of a networked system, one of the three quality of service (QoS) characteristics along with security and performance. Now that computer networks are supporting many of the applications crucial to the success of the emerging Information Society – including business, health care, education, science, and government – it is particularly important to ensure that the underlying network infrastructure is resilient to events and attacks that will inevitably occur. Included in these challenges are flash crowd events, in which servers cannot cope with a very large onset of valid traffic, and denial of service attacks which aim to damage networked system with malicious traffic. In this paper, we outline the case for mechanisms to deal with such events and attacks, and we propose programmable networking techniques as the best way ahead, illustrated by a flash crowd