Degree of network damage: A measurement for intensity of network damage

Traditionally, communication networks have been designed to tolerate few link and/or network equipment failures. With the wide deployment of network infrastructures and increasingly stringent requirement on network reliability, the multiple-failure scenario including large-scale damage have become the major thread to network survivability. Some research efforts have been recently devoted to the study of network vulnerability against disaster or power-outage which can make tens to thousands of network elements unavailable and result in an unacceptable long service latency and recovery time. However, the lack of a general measurement on network damage makes it hard to characterize the effect of such destructive event on the network infrastructure and service quality. To achieve a deep understanding on the impact of network damage, this paper attempts to define degree of network damage (DND), a measurement used to classify the effect of a destructive event on network infrastructures, human, and traffic flows. Based on the disaster intensity scales and a detailed analysis on the effect of large-scale disasters on a network, we classify the DND into five scales, in which the lowest scale I represents a weak and short term destruction while the highest scale V indicates a catastrophic event causing almost a complete loss of network services. It is expected that the DND measurement will benefit the disaster-resilient network design, network vulnerability assessment, predisaster protection, network destruction evaluation as well as post-disaster recovery.