A Correlation-aware Diverse Variant Placement to Increase Network Resilience

Due to the high homogeneity of current routing infrastructure, the resilience of the network is facing a serious threat when a defective software upgrade or a denial-of-service attack occurs. Many existing works adopt heterogeneity philosophy to improve the resilience of the network. For example, diverse variants are placed to nodes in the network. However, the existing works assume that diverse variants do not have common vulnerabilities, which is an invalid assumption in some real networks. Therefore, the existing diverse variant placement algorithms could not achieve optimal performance. In this paper, we consider the situation that some variants have common vulnerabilities. We model the correlation-aware diverse variant placement problem as an integer-programming optimization problem. Since the problem is NP-hard, we design a Simulated Annealing-based algorithm to efficiently solve the problem. The simulation results show that compared with baseline algorithms, the proposed algorithms can effectively improve network resilience about 15%.