Enhanced network survivability through balanced resource criticality

The authors describe two entropy-based measures that can be used to assess how close a network design comes to being maximally survivable: normalized node entropy (NNE) and normalized link entropy (NLE). Maximum survivability is achieved when the enemy cannot identify critical points of failure and must remove a maximum number of nodes/links before the network becomes disconnected. The normalized node and link entropy measures provide the network designer with an indication of how well individual network resources have been used to produce a highly survivable network structure. For instance, an NNE value of unity occurs in network configurations where all nodes appear equally important to the interconnection structure, such as in a ring or a fully connected network. In contrast, star configurations have NNE values of zero, since the center node can be identified as most critical to maintaining the network's interconnection structure.<
>