Attack-survivable routing and wavelength assignment for high-power jamming

Transparent optical networks (TONs) are vulnerable to high-power jamming attacks aimed at service disruption by exploiting the inherent characteristics of optical fibers, amplifiers and switches. In this type of attack, a high-power jamming signal is injected in the network to degrade the quality of legitimate user signals. Conventional survivability approaches which protect transmission in occurrences of component faults might not provide protection from attacks as the working and the backup path of a connection might both be within the reach of the attacking signal. In this paper, we propose a novel concept of identifying a so-called Attack Group (AG) of each lightpath and develop a dedicated path protection approach which ensures that the primary and the backup path of each connection be attack group disjoint, i.e., not within the reach of a same potential attacker. Furthermore, the proposed attack-survivable routing and wavelength assignment is aimed at reducing the maximum potential damage from these attacks, measured by an objective criterion called Attack Radius (AR), as well as minimizing the number of used wavelengths to be resource-effective. In comparison with generic dedicated path protection without attack awareness, the proposed approach shows a significant enhancement of network survivability in the presence of attacks at a small trade-off of increased wavelength usage.