In
computer network
A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...
ing, resilience is the ability to "provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of
faults and challenges to normal operation." Threats and challenges for services can range from simple misconfiguration over large scale natural disasters to targeted attacks. As such, network resilience touches a very wide range of topics. In order to increase the resilience of a given communication network, the probable challenges and risks have to be identified and appropriate resilience metrics have to be defined for the service to be protected.
The importance of network resilience is continuously increasing, as communication networks are becoming a fundamental component in the operation of critical infrastructures. Consequently, recent efforts focus on interpreting and improving network and computing resilience with applications to critical infrastructures. As an example, one can consider as a resilience objective the provisioning of services over the network, instead of the services of the network itself. This may require coordinated response from both the network and from the services running on top of the network.
These services include:
* supporting
distributed processing
A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...
* supporting
network storage
* maintaining service of communication services such as
**
video conferencing
Videotelephony, also known as videoconferencing and video teleconferencing, is the two-way or multipoint reception and transmission of audio signal, audio and video signals by people in different locations for Real-time, real time communication. ...
**
instant messaging
Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigge ...
**
online collaboration
Computer-supported collaboration research focuses on technology that affects groups, organizations, communities and societies, e.g., voice mail and text chat. It grew from cooperative work study of supporting people's work activities and working re ...
* access to applications and data as needed
Note that resilience and
survivability Survivability is the ability to remain alive or continue to exist. The term has more specific meaning in certain contexts. Ecological
Following disruptive forces such as flood, fire, disease, war, or climate change some species of flora, fauna, ...
are interchangeably used according to the specific context of a given study.
Castet J., Saleh J. Survivability and Resiliency of Spacecraft and Space-Based Networks: a Framework for Characterization and Analysis", '' American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, AIAA Technical Report 2008-7707. Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP 2006)'', Santa Barbara, California, USA, November 2006
/ref>
See also
*Availability
In reliability engineering, the term availability has the following meanings:
* The degree to which a system, subsystem or equipment is in a specified operable and committable state at the start of a mission, when the mission is called for at ...
*Fault tolerance
Fault tolerance is the property that enables a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of one or more faults within some of its components. If its operating quality decreases at all, the decrease is proportional to the ...
References
Computer networks
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