Network Planning with Bilevel optimization to Address Attacks to Physical Infrastructure of SDN
Qian Lv, Jing Zhu, Fen Zhou, Zuqing Zhu · 2020
It is known that the design of the control plane (CP) is vital in the network planning for software-defined networking (SDN), while to improve throughput and enlarge geographical coverage, optical networks are commonly used as the physical infrastructure of SDN. However, physical-layer attacks can disrupt the operation of an optical network and thus complicate the CP design. In this work, we consider planned physical-layer attacks when designing the CP of an SDN that uses an optical network as its physical infrastructure. We first show that the CP design problem should be modeled as a bilevel optimization, where the network planner designs the CP with the minimum vulnerability to physical-layer attacks (i.e., the upper-level optimization), while the attacker plans and launches attacks to disrupt the designed CP (i.e., the lower-level optimization). Then, the bilevel mode is transformed into a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model, which can solve the CP design problem exactly. We also propose a heuristic to tackle the problem time-efficiently.