Network adaptability to disaster disruptions by exploiting degraded-service tolerance

The rapid increase in network traffic with new bandwidth-hungry applications such as cloud computing and telemedicine makes disaster survivability a crucial concern as the data (and revenue) loss caused by large-scale correlated cascading failures can be very high. To alleviate their impact, new measures should be taken since the nature of the network changes dramatically as available resources decrease during disasters. We develop a metric, called degraded-service tolerance, which can reduce protection cost and network disruption, and support maximal carried traffic in case of disasters. Degraded-service-tolerant connections can be admitted and recovered with reduced bandwidth under resource crunch. Our scheme re-assigns resources among connections by leveraging their degraded-service tolerance. A case study shows how our proposal can be applied to boost network performance during the resource crunch following a disaster.