Adaptive Immunity through Differential Elasticity

Malicious attacks are often targeted to affect the most vulnerable or most critical resources of a system. In sensor networks, because of the large amount of inherent redundancy, the most serious threats are the ones attacking critical paths in the network attempting to break them thus disrupting the overall function of the network. In this paper we define a set of graph properties that characterize the level of vulnerability of specific links. We use these properties to define a bio-inspired model of self-organization and adaptive reorganization that impart networks with resilience in the face of a variety of scenarios from simple power depletion to targeted malicious attacks. Keywordsfault-tolerance; managing redundancy; kconnectedness; differential k-connectedness; elasticity.