Network Resilience Assessment via QoS Degradation Metrics: An Algorithmic Approach

Abstract: This paper focuses on network resilience to perturbation of edge weight. Other than connectivity, many network applications nowadays rely upon some measure of network distance between a pair of connected nodes. In these systems, a metric related to network functionality is associated to each edge. A pair of nodes only being functional if the weighted, shortest-path distance between the pair is below a given threshold \texttt{T}. Consequently, a natural question is on which degree the change of edge weights can damage the network functionality? With this motivation, we study a new problem, \textit{Quality of Service Degradation}: given a set of pairs, find a minimum budget to increase the edge weights which ensures the distance between each pair exceeds $\mathtt{T}$. We introduce four algorithms with theoretical performance guarantees for this problem. Each of them has its own strength in trade-off between effectiveness and running time, which are illustrated both in theory and comprehensive experimental evaluation.