How to Survive Targeted Fiber Cuts: A Game Theoretic Approach for Resilient SDON Control Plane Design

Paper in proceeding, 2020

Software-defined optical networking (SDON) paradigm enables programmable, adaptive and application-aware backbone networks via centralized network control and management. Aside from the manifold advantages, the control plane (CP) of an SDON is exposed to diverse security threats. As the CP usually shares the underlying optical infrastructure with the data plane (DP), an attacker can launch physical-layer attacks to cause severe disruption of the CP. This paper studies the problem of resilient CP design under targeted fiber cut attacks, whose effectiveness depends on both the CP designer's and the attacker's strategies. Therefore, we model the problem as a non-cooperative game between the designer and the attacker, where the designer tries to set up the CP to minimize the attack effectiveness, while the attacker aims at maximizing the effectiveness by cutting the most critical links. We define the game strategies and utility functions, conduct theoretical analysis to obtain the Nash Equilibrium (NE) as the solution of the game. Extensive simulations confirm the effectiveness of our proposal in improving the CP resilience to targeted fiber cuts.