Modelling performances of an autonomic router running under attack

Modern warehouse-scale computing facilities, seamlessly enabled by virtualisation technologies, are based on thousands of independent computing nodes that are administered according to efficiency criteria that depend on workload. Networks play a pivotal role in these systems, as they are likely to be the performance bottleneck, and because of the high variability of data and management traffic. Because of the scale of the system, the prevalent network management model is based on autonomic networking, a paradigm based on self-regulation of the networking subsystem, that requires routers capable of adapting their policies to traffic by a local or global strategy. In this paper we focus on performance modelling of autonomic routers, to provide a simple, yet representative elementary performance model to provide a starting point for a comprehensive autonomic network modelling approach. The proposed model is used to evaluate the behaviour of a router under attack under realistic workload and parameters assumptions.