Proactive risk mitigation for communication network resilience in disaster scenarios

The impact of natural disasters can be catastrophic for communication networks and may cause significant costs for service providers and subscribers. Dynamic spreading of failures in natural disasters follows a time-varying probabilistic pattern, which requires a dynamic probabilistic response to mitigate the effect of failures. In this paper we examine the preventive protection scheme as an effective dynamic probabilistic solution to address large-scale failure scenarios and provide an algorithm to adjust probabilistic decision-making parameters. The proposed scheme can be used by network operators to adjust decision parameters in a preventive protection model to decrease the number of disrupted connections in an effective way. Reducing the number of damaged connections may lead to increased network resiliency level, which is the main concern in large-scale failure scenarios caused by natural disasters.