Resilience in Trustworthy Wireless Systems

Abstract: Resilience has emerged as a fundamental capability for future wireless systems operating in dynamic and uncertain environments. Although resilience has attracted growing attention across academia, industry, and standardization, its conceptual scope, enabling mechanisms, and realization techniques remain fragmented. This paper presents a systematic framework of resilience in wireless systems from a trustworthiness perspective. We first formalize the concept of resilience and distinguish it from related uncertainty-aware terminologies, including reliability, robustness, adaptability, survivability, and recoverability. We then establish a hierarchical framework that organizes resilience into capability dimensions and enabling mechanisms, and that quantifies resilience through different technical aspects. We further use physical links and unmanned aerial vehicle networks as representative wireless scenarios to demonstrate how resilience can be systematically realized through the joint design of architectures, operations, and algorithms. Finally, we examine the fundamental trade-offs in resilience engineering: Improving resilience generally incurs costs in resource efficiency, nominal performance, information acquisition, implementation complexity, and latency.