Characterizing the Role of Power Grids in Internet Resilience

TL;DR

This paper explores how power grid failures impact Internet resilience, revealing significant dependencies and introducing a tool to improve deployment strategies considering these vulnerabilities.

Contribution

It provides the first analysis of the overlap between power and Internet infrastructures and develops NetWattZap, a tool for dependency-aware Internet infrastructure deployment.

Findings

65% of Internet infrastructure is in a few power failure zones

Power dependencies reduce available cloud zones from 87 to 19

Developed NetWattZap for resilient Internet infrastructure deployment

Abstract

Among critical infrastructures, power grids and communication infrastructure are identified as uniquely critical since they enable the operation of all other sectors. Due to their vital role, the research community has undertaken extensive efforts to understand the complex dynamics and resilience characteristics of these infrastructures, albeit independently. However, power and communication infrastructures are also interconnected, and the nature of the Internet's dependence on power grids is poorly understood. In this paper, we take the first step toward characterizing the role of power grids in Internet resilience by analyzing the overlap of global power and Internet infrastructures. We investigate the impact of power grid failures on Internet availability and find that nearly $65\%$ of the public Internet infrastructure components are concentrated in a few ($< 10$) power grid failure zones. More importantly, power grid dependencies severely limit the number of disjoint availability zones of cloud providers. When dependency on grids serving data center locations is taken into account, the number of isolated AWS Availability Zones reduces from 87 to 19. Building upon our findings, we develop NetWattZap, an Internet resilience analysis tool that generates power grid dependency-aware deployment suggestions for Internet infrastructure and application components, which can also take into account a wide variety of user requirements.