A Network Planning and Management Tool for mitigating the impact of spatially correlated failures in infrastructure networks

Current practices of fault-tolerant network design ignore the fact that most network infrastructure faults are localized or spatially correlated (i.e., confined to regions). Network operators require new tools to mitigate the impact of such region based faults on their infrastructures. Utilizing the support from the U.S. Department of Defense, and by consolidating a wide range of theories and solutions developed in the last few years, the authors of this paper have developed an advanced Network Planning and Management Tool (NPMT) that facilitates the design and provisioning of robust and resilient networks. The tool provides multi-faceted network design, evaluation and simulation capabilities for network planners. Future extensions of the tool currently being worked upon not only expand the tool's capabilities, but also extend these capabilities to heterogeneous interdependent networks such as communication, power, water and satellite networks.