Fundamentals of Resilience of Communication Networks and Networked Systems

Communication networks have become essential for the everyday operation of our society. In particular, the Internet considered an indispensable part of the critical information infrastructure for several personal and business applications, is now expected to be always available. This chapter elaborates on resilience and its importance for networks. A particular focus is on a detailed classification of failure scenarios, the definition of network resilience and its desired properties, the explanation of consecutive phases of recovery of services in failure scenarios, a discussion of the impact of human and organizational issues on the resilience of networked systems followed by the analysis of costs, benefits, and challenges to the deployment of resilience mechanisms.