Assessing the effects of physical layer attacks on content accessibility and latency in optical CDNs

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are a major enabler of large-scale content distribution for Internet applications. Many of these applications require high bandwidth and low latency for a satisfactory user experience, e.g., cloud gaming, augmented reality, tactile Internet and vehicular communications [1]. Replication is one of the most prominent solutions to meet the requirements of latency-sensitive applications [1, 2]. However, infrastructure disruptions can greatly degrade the performance of such applications, or even cease their proper execution. The extent of degradation can be exacerbated by malicious attackers that target the critical elements of the CDN physical infrastructure to disconnect or severely degrade services.