Smart city and IoT resilience, survivability, and disruption tolerance: Challenges, modelling, and a survey of research opportunities

The loT (Internet of things) is emerging as a wide variety of devices are attached to the Internet to support ubiquitous and pervasive sensing and computing, home automation, and the shift toward smart cities. As the IoT becomes a critical part of the Global Internet on which we increasingly rely, resilience is increasingly important. Of greatest concern is resilience to large-scale disasters that destroy an area of the network, and attacks that result in correlated failures to the most vulnerable parts of the network. This invited paper discusses the challenges, modelling, and research opportunities in achieving resilience in the Future Internet incorporating the IoT in the context of smart cities. The Global Internet is already an extremely complex multirealm multilevel network that is difficult to understand and model; the incorporation of the IoT in the context of smart cities significantly increases this complexity, not only in the number of nodes and structure, but also in the increased heterogeneity of protocols and mechanisms. Furthermore, the Internet (including mobile telephony networks and the IoT) is only one of several interdependent critical infrastructures on which smart cities will rely, including the power grid and transportation networks. Capturing, modelling, and ensuring resilience of these interdependencies is not trivial. We
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propose the concept of islands of resilience in which the realm boundaries of interdependent critical infrastructures align, and such that each realm contains local critical services (e,.g. DNS, caching, CDNs, PKI, edge clouds) such that they can continue to operate even when severed from core infrastructures. Furthermore by interconnecting islands of resilience by hardened corridors of resilience to one-another and to the core infrastructure, the probability of island isolation is reduced.