Resilient Control Plane Design for Inter-Datacenter Cloud Network with Various Attacks

By decoupling the control plane (CP) from the data plane (DP), software-defined inter-datacenter cloud networking (SD-IDCN) paradigm can provide centralized network control and management (NC&M) for cloud platform provider. Although decoupled, the CP of an SD-IDCN usually shares the infrastructure with the DP physically, which is vulnerable to various security threats, such as software attack of disabling the controller node or even physical attack of cutting down the network link. In this paper, we consider the threats of SD-IDCN’s threatens of network nodes and links, which can be launched intentionally. Under the circumstances, we study the problem of resilient CP design assisted by game theory. Specifically, the problem is modeled as a non-cooperative game between two players, i.e., the designer and the attacker, whose strategies are different CP design schemes and different attack schemes, respectively. The designer’s utility function is positively correlated with the connectivity in the residual network after an attack, with which the attacker’s utility function is negatively correlated. Assuming that both players are rational to maximize their own utilities, we discuss whether the game is degenerate or not and accordingly solve the game to obtain the Nash Equilibrium (NE) (i.e., the solution of the game). Extensive simulations are performed in USNET backbone topology to evaluate the game theoretic CP design approach with different scenarios.