How to build a sovereign network? -- A proposal to measure network sovereignty

Abstract

Network sovereignty is a network operator's ability to reduce the dependency on component manufacturers to minimize the impact of manufacturer failures. Network operators now face new design challenges to increase network sovereignty and avoid vendor lock-in problems because a high dependency on a manufacturer corresponds to low survivability if that manufacturer is unavailable. The main contribution of this work is the proposal of a novel metric to measure network sovereignty, the Cut Set Coloring (CSC) score. Based on the CSC core metric CSC-ILP, our Integer Linear Program formulation is presented to maximize network sovereignty. We compare CSC-ILP's performance with state of the art manufacturer assignment strategies.