Marija Furdek

Wavelength assignment for reducing in-band crosstalk attack propagation in optical networks: ILP formulations and heuristic algorithms

Today’s Transparent Optical Networks (TONs) are highly vulnerable to various physical-layer attacks, such as high-power jamming, which can cause severe service disruption or even service denial. The transparency of TONs enables certain attacks to propagate through the network, not only increasing their damage proportions, but also making source identification and attack localization more difficult. High-power jamming attacks causing in-band crosstalk in switches are amongst the most malicious of such attacks. In this paper, we propose a wavelength assignment scheme to reduce their damage assuming limited attack propagation capabilities. This complements our previous work in Furdek et al. (M. Furdek, N. Skorin-Kapov, M. Grbac, Attack-aware wavelength assignment for localization of in-band crosstalk attack propagation, IEEE/OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networking 2 (11) (2010) 1000–1009) where we investigated infinite jamming attack propagation to find an upper bound on the network vulnerability to such attacks. Here, we consider a more realistic scenario where crosstalk attacks can spread only via primary and/or secondary attackers and define new objective criteria for wavelength assignment, called the PAR (Primary Attack Radius) and SAR (Secondary Attack Radius), accordingly. We formulate the problem variants as integer linear programs (ILPs) with the objectives of minimizing the PAR and SAR values. Due to the intractability of the ILP formulations, for larger instances we propose GRASP (Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure) heuristic algorithms to find suboptimal solutions in reasonable time. Results show that these approaches can obtain solutions using the same number of wavelengths as classical wavelength assignment, while significantly reducing jamming attack damage proportions in optical networks.

Physical-layer security in evolving optical networks

We are witnessing the evolution of optical networks toward highly heterogeneous, flexible networks with a widening area of application. As the bandwidth and reliability performance requirements of mission-critical applications tighten, and the amount of carried data grows, issues related to optical network security are becoming increasingly important. Optical networks are vulnerable to several types of attacks at the physical layer, typically aimed at disrupting the service or gaining unauthorized access to carried data. Such security breaches can induce financial losses to clients or loss of privacy, or cause network-wide service disruption, possibly leading to huge data and revenue losses. Awareness of system weaknesses and possible attack methods is a prerequisite for designing effective network security solutions. As optical networks evolve, new and changing vulnerabilities must be identified and dealt with efficiently. To this end, this article provides a comprehensive overview of potential physical-layer attack scenarios in current and future optical networks. It then proposes a general security framework, outlining possible strategies for dealing with such attacks, meant to aid in the development of efficient provisioning, monitoring, protection, and restoration schemes in the context of optical-layer security.

Vulnerabilities and security issues in optical networks

The paper provides a comprehensive overview of security issues in state-of-the-art optical networks. It identifies and describes the main vulnerabilities of todays and future networks and outlines potential methods of attack which could exploit these vulnerabilities.

Evaluating availability of optical networks based on self-healing network function programmable ROADMs

Due to the large transmission speeds and enormous volume of transferred data, network reliability performance and cost-efficiency are among the key concerns in optical network design. Reducing the number of used optical components with higher failure probability within nodes represents a promising approach for achieving reliable and cost-effective optical network operation as it reduces the correlated risk of connection failures and enables reusing idle components as redundancy for failure recovery. This can result in greater overall network availability and lower loss of data and related revenue. Recently introduced synthetic network function programmable optical nodes implemented by architecture on demand (AoD) support the aforementioned approach by offering high levels of flexibility, modularity, and scalability. In AoD nodes, an optical backplane (i.e., optical switch) hosts optical components and enables arbitrary node configurations by cross-connecting attached modules. As a result, each lightpath passing through the node uses only the components necessary for fulfilling the switching and processing requirements. AoD nodes can perform switching at the wavelength and waveband granularity and also support switching of lightpaths at the fiber level by connecting an input fiber directly to the targeted output, referred to as fiber switching (FS). The latter functionality is particularly beneficial for the availability aspect, as it helps decrease the number of failure-prone components traversed by each lightpath, allowing them to be reused as redundancy. In this paper we demonstrate and evaluate self-healing capabilities of AoD nodes arising from their flexibility and ability to employ idle components for failure recovery. To improve efficiency of self-healing by increasing the number of idle components within nodes, we propose a routing algorithm which obtains a targeted portion of lightpaths switched at the fiber level, called the enforced FS (EFS) algorithm. We study the impact of AoD on network availability at different traffic switching granularities and compare it to traditional hard-wired node architecture via simulation. The results show significant improvements of availability and recovery time due to node-level restoration, with reduced network outage time and operator revenue losses. Finally, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time we experimentally demonstrate two novel hard-wired and synthetic reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer architectures with redundancy and all-optical self-healing capabilities.

Sparse power equalization placement for limiting jamming attack propagation in transparent optical networks

The latest advances in Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) technology are making it possible to build all-optical transparent WDM networks, which are expected to be able to satisfy the rapid gro ...

Attack-Aware Dedicated Path Protection in Optical Networks

Due to the high data rates in optical networks, physical-layer attacks targeting service degradation, such as power jamming, can potentially lead to large data and revenue losses. Conventional network survivability approaches which establish link-disjoint working and backup paths to protect from component faults may not provide adequate protection for such attacks. Namely, the working and the backup paths, although link-disjoint, might both be affected by a single attack scenario due to specific attack propagation characteristics. To enhance the existing survivability approaches, we utilize the concept of an attack group (AG) which incorporates these characteristics to identify connections which can simultaneously be affected by a single attack. We apply this concept to dedicated path protection (DPP) and develop attack-aware DPP (AA-DPP) approaches which aim to establish AG-disjoint primary and backup paths in a cost-effective manner. We provide a two-step ILP formulation for the routing and wavelength assignment of the working and backup paths, as well as a heuristic for larger problem instances. Numerical results indicate that the proposed approaches provide dedicated path protection schemes with enhanced attack protection without using more resources (i.e., wavelengths, average path lengths) than standard DPP methods.

Routing and Spectrum Assignment in Elastic Filterless Optical Networks

Elastic optical networking is considered a promising candidate to improve the spectral efficiency of optical networks. One of the most important planning challenges of elastic optical networks is the NP-hard routing and spectrum assignment (RSA) problem. In this paper, we investigate offline RSA in elastic filterless optical networks, which use a passive broadcast-and-select architecture to offer network agility. Here, an elastic optical network is referred to as the optical network that can adapt the channel bandwidth, data rate, and transmission format for each traffic demand in order to offer maximum throughput. In elastic filterless networks, the presence of unfiltered signals resulting from the drop-and-continue node architecture must be considered as an additional constraint in the RSA problem. In this paper, first, the RSA problem in elastic filterless networks is formulated by using an integer linear program to obtain optimal solutions for small networks. Due to the problem complexity, two efficient RSA heuristics are also proposed to achieve suboptimal solutions for larger networks in reasonable time. Simulation results show that significant bandwidth savings in elastic filterless networks can be achieved compared with the fixed-grid filterless solutions. The proposed approach is further tested in multi-period traffic scenarios and combined with periodical spectrum defragmentation, leading to additional improvement in spectrum utilization of elastic filterless optical networks.

Limiting the propagation of intra-channel crosstalk attacks in optical networks through wavelength assignment

Physical layer attacks in transparent optical networks are a serious security threat to network operation. We propose a novel protection approach based on wavelength assignment which limits the maximal propagation of intra-channel crosstalk attacks.

Minimum cost deployment of radio and transport resources in centralized radio architectures

The traffic in mobile access networks is increasing at an exponential rate, with the majority of this traffic being generated indoor. To cope with this trend, heterogeneous network (HetNet) architectures based on the centralized radio architecture (CRA) concept have been recently proposed. A CRA network is able to reach high wireless network performance by centralizing the radio physical layer functions of macro and small cells. On the other hand, a CRA network puts strict latency and capacity requirements on the transport segment, which usually comprises a mixture of fiber- and copper-based infrastructure. These strict constraints may translate into high deployment costs if not carefully addressed. This paper proposes an optimized deployment strategy for CRA networks in residential areas. The objective of the proposed strategy is to contain the total deployment cost by minimizing the number of wireless and transport resources required. We demonstrate that our deployment strategy allows for a significant reduction of the required amount of network components and the overall network cost compared to the existing deployment solutions.

Flexible Bandwidth Allocation in Filterless Optical Networks

We introduce the new concept of an elastic filterless optical network and propose an efficient heuristic algorithm for solving the static routing and spectrum assignment problem. Our simulation results obtained for different network topologies under multi-period traffic show increasing bandwidth savings with the growth of traffic load compared to a fixed-grid scenario. We also show the benefits of periodical spectrum defragmentation.