Resilience of communication networks to random failures and disasters: An optimization perspective

Communication networks are subject to many challenges leading to single or multiple failures of its elements. Example failure scenarios include unintentional failures due to scheduled maintenance activities or massive failures caused by disaster-induced events. Therefore, it is crucial to enhance the networks with redundancy and resilience mechanisms able to maintain the availability of network services after a failure. As these problems are often inherently hard to solve to optimality, the role of time-efficient approximation schemes is essential. In this paper, we highlight the selected problems of communication networks resilience addressed in this issue of Networks.