An approach to quantifying resilience in mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Resilience is the ability of a network to provide acceptable service in the presence of challenges to normal operations. With increasing significance of resilience in modern communications infrastructure and services, there is a need for rigorous quantitative evaluation of resilience. In this paper, we present a framework to quantify resilience between any two layers in the network stack. Resilience is quantified as a function of state transitions wherein states are defined as aggregation of points in the two orthogonal dimensions of operational and service state. This approach is applied to the case of mobile ad hoc networks in order to determine the resilience of various levels to the perturbations in the normal operations of the network. Simulation results show that this framework provides a tractable approach and abstraction to quantify multilevel resilience.