DoS-Resilient Virtual Networks through Multipath Embedding and Opportunistic Recovery

Network virtualization can potentially limit the impact of attacks by isolating traffic from different networks. How-ever, routers and links are still vulnerable to attacks on the underlying network. Specifically, should a physical link be compromised, all embedded virtual links will be affected. Previous work protects virtual networks by setting aside backup resources. Although effective, this solution tends to be expensive as backup resources usually remain idle. In this paper, we present a novel virtual network allocation approach which explores the trade-off between resilience to attacks and efficiency in resource utilization. Our approach is composed of two complementary strategies, one preventive and the other reactive. The former embeds virtual links into multiple substrate paths, while the latter attempts to real-locate any capacity affected by an underlying DoS attack. Both strategies are modeled as optimization problems. Nu-merical results show the level of resilience to attacks and the low cost demanded by our approach