Evaluating Local Disaster Recovery Strategies

It is of vital importance to maintain at least some network functionality after a disaster, for example by temporarily replacing damaged nodes by emergency nodes. We propose a framework to evaluate different node replacement strategies, based on a large set of representative disasters. We prove that computing the optimal choice of nodes to replace is an NP-hard problem and propose several simple strategies. We evaluate these strategies on two U.S. topologies and show that a simple greedy strategy can perform close to optimal.