Length-Bounded Paths Interdiction in Continuous Domain for Network Performance Assessment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new framework for assessing network resilience by identifying minimal node sets that disrupt length-bounded paths, with proven approximation guarantees and experimental validation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel bicriteria approximation framework for the NP-hard cLPI problem, utilizing two oracles and multiple solution strategies for network resilience assessment.

Findings

Framework achieves theoretical bicriteria approximation guarantees.

Experimental results demonstrate effectiveness of proposed solutions.

Insights into trade-offs between solution size and accuracy are provided.

Abstract

Studying on networked systems, in which a communication between nodes is functional if their distance under a given metric is lower than a pre-defined threshold, has received significant attention recently. In this work, we propose a metric to measure network resilience on guaranteeing the pre-defined performance constraint. This metric is investigated under an optimization problem, namely \textbf{Length-bounded Paths Interdiction in Continuous Domain} (cLPI), which aims to identify a minimum set of nodes whose changes cause routing paths between nodes become undesirable for the network service. We show the problem is NP-hard and propose a framework by designing two oracles, \textit{Threshold Blocking} (TB) and \textit{Critical Path Listing} (CPL), which communicate back and forth to construct a feasible solution to cLPI with theoretical bicriteria approximation guarantees. Based on this framework, we propose two solutions for each oracle. Each combination of one solution to \tb and one solution to \cpl gives us a solution to cLPI. The bicriteria guarantee of our algorithms allows us to control the solutions's trade-off between the returned size and the performance accuracy. New insights into the advantages of each solution are further discussed via experimental analysis.