Disciplines and measures of information resilience

Communication networks have become a fundamental part of many critical infrastructures, playing an important role in information delivery in various failure scenarios triggered e.g., by forces of nature (including earthquakes, tornados, fires, etc.), technology-related disasters (for instance due to power blackout), or malicious human activities. A number of recovery schemes have been defined in the context of network resilience (with the primary focus on communication possibility in failure scenarios including access to a particular host, or information exchange between a certain pair of end nodes). However, because end-users are becoming more and more interested in information itself (regardless of its physical location in the network), it is appropriate to complement the well-defined framework of network resilience with one that addresses information resilience, and to introduce definitions of relevant disciplines and measures, as proposed in this paper.