Abstract
Various large-scale failures and attacks (e.g., natural disasters, high-altitude electromagnetic pulses (HEMPs), weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), etc.) can instigate initial failures of critical network components (e.g., router, generator) in a cyber-physical infrastructure. In addition, the intra-dependency among various components inside a communication network and the inter-dependency with supporting power supply nodes can contribute to the propagation of the initial failures. Under the probabilistic initial failures of the networks' physical infrastructures, in this paper, we develop a stochastic model to track the functionality dynamics in a communication network considering dependency among communication nodes as well as with power nodes. A closed-form analytical formula is derived to find the steady state probabilities of all communication nodes in the communication network which are influenced by power node functionalities. Using this model, we show that both intra-dependencies among communication nodes and inter-dependencies with power nodes play a key role to the failure dynamics of communication network, which is also validated by numerical simulation on a real network topology.