Leveraging Game Theory to Achieve Efficient Attack-Aware Service Provisioning in EONs

Multidomain elastic optical networks (MD-EONs) help to improve network scalability, extend service coverage, and facilitate good interoperability to orchestrate administrative domains managed by different carriers. Since the users in other domains can launch cross-domain physical-layer attacks to a domain, this paper studies the problem of attack-aware service provisioning in one domain of an MD-EON. We consider a realistic scenario that does not treat all the interdomain lightpaths as malicious ones, and try to arrange the lightpaths' routing and spectrum assignment (RSA) schemes with the help of the game theory to balance the spectrum utilization and security-level of the domain well. Specifically, we define a two-player Bayesian game to represent the provisioning procedure for each interdomain request, and design the game strategies and utility functions for the players (i.e., the domain manager and the user from other domains). Then, we formulate a nonlinear programming model, solve the game with it to obtain a Bayesian Nash equilibrium (BNE), and determine the best strategies for the players based on the BNE. Finally, with the game model, we propose a game-assisted RSA algorithm to achieve attack-aware service provisioning efficiently. The proposed algorithm is evaluated with extensive simulations and the results confirm its effectiveness.