On the Bilevel Optimization to Design Control Plane for SDONs in Consideration of Planned Physical-Layer Attacks

Abstract

In the network planning of software-defined optical networks (SDONs), the control plane design is of great importance because it directly affects the performance and reliability of network control and management (NC&M). In this article, we consider the planned physical-layer attacks from a rational attacker, which can analyze the control plane of an SDON and target its attacks to the most vulnerable part. To address such attacks, we model the control plane design as a bilevel optimization, where the upper-level optimization is for the network planner to design the control plane whose vulnerability to planned attacks is minimized, while the lower-level optimization is for the attacker to plan its attacks such that the control plane can be disturbed as severely as possible. We first develop two approaches to solve the bilevel model exactly. Specifically, we first leverage the cutting plane method to solve it directly, and then transform it into a single-level mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model with the Bellman method for problem solving. To improve the time efficiency for large-scale problems, we also propose a polynomial-time approximation algorithm based on linear programming (LP) relaxation and randomized rounding. Extensive simulations with various physical topologies verify the effectiveness of our proposals.