Security-Aware Carrier Network Planning

Optical networks are vital communication infrastructure that supports services critical for the functioning of information society. The continuous growth of network traffic with tightening performance requirements combined with evolving physical-layer security threats poses multi-faceted challenges for network operators. To reduce network exposure to physical-layer attacks while satisfying the traffic growth and maintaining economic viability, awareness of attacks can be incorporated into fundamental optical network planning procedures. This can be done in several ways, attaining different trade-offs between the cost and the achievable level of physical-level security. This chapter focuses on security-aware carrier network planning. It first provides an overview of the most important optical technologies for carrier networks, followed by a discussion of soft and hard attack-aware network planning schemes addressing attacks aimed at service disruption and eavesdropping. Depending on the available investments, these techniques rely solely on arranging the optical connections so as to minimize the damaging scope of attacks without using extra resources (soft schemes), or allow extra cost and strategically place additional equipment to limit attack propagation or enhance security monitoring (harder schemes). By analysing different variants of these procedures under particular traffic patterns, this chapter aims at providing an encompassing insight into advantages and trade-offs related to attack-aware network planning.