Secure and Resilient Routing: A Framework for Resilient Network Architectures

A common paradigm for a network service architecture is to provide a number of different services or applications in which all of them share resources; the routing framework provides the best path to all services. A simple twist to this basic notion is if we were to architect in a way to virtualize the network so that different services are clustered into different virtual, adaptive partitions to provide different levels of services. In considering this notion, it is important to note that a service offering can span the entire spectrum from complete sharing to physically dedicated partitioning. Furthermore, even without a shared environment, prioritization is also possible, for example, in packet scheduling for different service classes at a router. Typically, to provide a certain quality of service, which might be agreed upon through a service level agreement, a shared environment requires less network bandwidth due to statistical gain as opposed to a completely dedicated, partitioned environment to each different service—this is from the angle of a network service provider. However, in many instances, a middle of the road approach can be a viable alternative in which through virtualization, services can be offered guaranteed prioritized services, and more importantly, such virtualization can be adaptively configured, without requiring complete physical partitioning. Our middle of the road approach is motivated by a different service paradigm. Consider the simple scenario of two service classes, survivable critical (SC) services and normal services, in which the objective is to provide a certain level of service quality or protection to SC services even under an attack or a network stress situation. This attack or stress can be either of the following forms: (a) injection of excessive dummy traffic to overload the network or network elements, or (b) overtaking of a part of the network (e.g. some routers) so that some network elements become untrusted for use by SC services. An important driver then is that the network has the framework to consider trustworthiness and the routing protocol has the appropriate functionality that can support trustworthiness as well as resilience. ∗D. Medhi is with the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Missouri– Kansas City (email: [email protected]). †D. Huang is with the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Arizona State University (email: [email protected]).