Structural Methods to Improve the Robustness of Anycast Communications to Large-Scale Failures

Book chapter, 2020

This chapter is dedicated to the description of structural methods aiming to improve the robustness of anycast communications to large-scale failures, either due to natural disasters or malicious human activities. The chapter considers both software-defined networks (SDNs) where the anycast nodes are the nodes hosting SDN controllers, and content delivery networks (CDNs) where the anycast nodes are the nodes hosting content replicas. Most of the structural methods described in this chapter aim to optimally select the anycast nodes in a given network. The chapter first addresses the robustness of anycast communications to natural disasters based on geodiversity routing. Then, different methods are described to select the SDN controller locations aiming to maximize the SDN control plane robustness to malicious node attacks. Finally, the chapter addresses the robustness of CDNs to malicious link cuts by describing methods for the network upgrade (based either on the addition of new links or new replica locations) and for the optimal selection of content replica locations.