REF: Resilience Evaluation Framework

Resilience is one of the key goals of multihoming, as multiple interfaces/addresses on multiaccess nodes can be used to increase fault tolerance. Future networks will be empowered with multiaccess but, at the same time, applications and protocols must incorporate mechanisms to optimize the use of numerous interfaces/addresses. Until now, the resilience of multihoming support in various protocols has been assessed in an ad-hoc manner. This paper introduces the Resilience Evaluation Framework (REF), which provides for an objective evaluation of the resilience capacity of a protocol. As an example evaluation, we use REF to study the resilience of SCTP multihoming. We employ OMNET++ simulations to demonstrate the suitability of REF for such evaluations and compare it with the Quality of Resilience (QoR) schema. We show that REF is suitable for general protocol resilience evaluations and defines a more realistic evaluation framework than QoR.