RiskRoute: A Framework for Mitigating Network Outage Threats

Presenter: Ramakrishnan Durairajan

Authors: Brian Eriksson (Technicolor Research), Ramakrishnan Durairajan (University of Wisconsin - Madison), Paul Barford (University of Wisconsin - Madison)

Network outages happen due to a wide variety of reasons. For example, censorship, cable cuts, or natural disasters. The paper present a framework for proactively mitigating network outages due to natural disasters, in particular weather-related network outages.  The key idea is that weather-related events follow predictable geographical and temporal patterns; therefore, they can be predicted before occurring.

The authors propose a new metric called "bit-risk miles" that takes quantifies the sensitivity of a path to weather-related disasters and allows to study tradeoffs between shorter paths vs. outage risk. The framework forecasts outage probability at PoP locations and selects a path from a set of possible paths.

The evaluation is conducted using FEMA/NOAA weather data and real-world routing data from 16 regional networks. The results show that routing significantly changes from shortest path routing to be more risk averse. The framework also guides new intra-domain routes and new peering relationships for inter-domain routing. The presentation concluded with a video demo for hurricanes Irene and Katrina.

Q: In your evaluation, do you also take into account traffic volume?

A: No, we only accounted for link count.

Q: Does the framework work in real-time?

A: Yes, it does.

Q: Can you implement your framework in real routers? What changes would they require?

A: It will require some change. Detailed analysis is left as a future work.