2013 Symposium Posters

Project Members
Prof. Fatma Mili

Redundancy has always been an essential ingredient of networks, responsible and a contributor to for providing fault-tolerance. Uniformly deploying nodes, more than the minimal requirement, distributed redundancy helps maximize fault-tolerance only in cases likenode failure due to power depletionto “mechanical” node failure, but does not provide adequate tolerance to malicious attacks. However, in certain cases of node failure, due to malicious attacks(targeted attack), the use of such traditional measures of redundancy proves to be inadequate. Malicious attacks, by design, are often targeted to affect the most vulnerable or the most critical resources of a system. In sensor networks, because of the large amount of inherent redundancy, the most serious threats are the ones attacking critical paths in the networkattempting to break them, thus disrupting the overall function of the network. In this paper we define a set of graph properties that characterize the level of vulnerability of specific links. We use these properties to define a bio-inspired model of self-organization and adaptive reorganization that impart networks with resilience in the face of a variety of scenarios from simple power depletion to targeted malicious attacks. The proposed concepts of differential connectivity and differential elasticity, help us realize the objective of self-organizing nodes in a self-aware dynamic environment.