PReSET: A toolset for the evaluation of network resilience strategies

Computer networks support many of the services that our society relies on. Therefore, ensuring their resilience to faults and challenges, such as attacks, is critical. To do this can require the execution of resilience strategies that perform dynamic reconfiguration of networks, including resilience-specific functionality. It is important that resilience strategies are evaluated prior to their execution, for example, to ensure they will not exacerbate an on-going problem. To facilitate this activity, we have developed a toolset that supports the evaluation of resilience strategies that are specified as event-driven policies. The toolset couples the Ponder2 policy-based management framework and the OMNeT++ simulation environment. In this paper, we discuss the network resilience problem and motivate simulation as a suitable way to evaluate resilience strategies. We describe the toolset we have developed, including its architecture and the implementation of a number of resilience mechanisms, and its application to evaluating strategies that detect and mitigate Internet worm behaviour.