Abstract — To proactively defend against intruders from readily jeopardizing single-path data sessions, we propose a distributed secure multipath solution to route data across multiple paths so that intruders require much more resources to mount successful attacks. Our work exhibits several important properties that include: (1) routing decisions are made locally by network nodes without the centralized information of the entire network topology, (2) routing decisions minimize throughput loss under a single-link attack with respect to different session models, and (3) routing decisions address multiple link attacks via lexicographic optimization. We devise two algorithms termed the Bound-Control algorithm and the Lex-Control algorithm, both of which provide provably optimal solutions. Experiments show that the Bound-Control algorithm is more effective to prevent the worst-case single-link attack when compared to the single-path approach, and that the Lex-Control algorithm further enhances the Bound-Control algorithm by countering severe single-link attacks and various types of multi-link attacks. Moreover, the Lex-Control algorithm offers prominent protection after only a few execution rounds, implying that we can sacrifice minimal routing protection for significantly improved algorithm performance. Finally, we examine the applicability of our proposed algorithms in a specialized defensive network architecture called the attack-resistant network and analyze how the algorithms address resiliency and security in different network settings. Index Terms — Resilience, security, multipath routing, optimization, maximum-flow problems, preflow-push, attackresistant networks. I.

Network optimization has always been a core problem domain in operations research, as well as in computer science, applied mathematics, and many fields of engineering and management. Network optimization problems arise in a variety of situations, and often in situations that apparently are quite unrelated to networks. These applications are scattered throughout the literature and until recently no single paper, book, or any other reference, summarized these applications. Consequently, the research and practitioner community has not fully appreciated the richness of these applications. This paper attempts to partially satisfy this important need by presenting a collection of applications of the following fundamental network optimization problems: the shortest path problem, the maximum flow problem, the minimum cost flow problem, assignment and matching problems, and the minimum spanning tree problem. We describe 25 applications of these problems and provide references for more than 100 additional applications. This paper is intended to provide an appreciation for the pervasiveness of network optimization problems. We hope that this paper will stimulate researchers and practitioners to model more decisions problems within the framework of network optimization.

We consider the problem of allocating bandwidth between two endpoints of a backbone network so that no parts of the network are unnecessarily loaded. We formulate the problem as lexicographic optimization, and develop algorithms for its solution. The solution consists of a) identifying a cut in the network where the optimal load can be determined on all the links of the cut, and b) considering the same problem in each of the subnetworks to which the cut is dividing the original network.

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For multicomputer or distributed systems that use circuit switching, wormhole routing, or virtual cut-through, 2 the communication overhead and the message delivery time depend largely upon link contention rather than upon the distance between the source and the destination. That is, a larger communication overhead or a longer delivery delay occurs to a message when it traverses a route with heavier traffic than one with a longer distance and lesser traffic. This characteristic greatly affects the selection of routes for interprocessor communication and/or load balancing. We consider the load balancing problem in these types of systems. Our objective is to find the maximum load imbalance that can be eliminated without violating the (traffic) capacity constraint while keeping the maximum link contention as low as possible. We investigate the load balancing problem under various conditions. First, we consider the case in which the excess load on each overloaded node is divisible. We de...