Network availability is a network’s ability to serve all traffic adequately at any instant. Network sovereignty is the network operator’s ability to reduce dependencies on component manufacturers. Recent geopolitical developments have forced several nations to embrace digital autonomy by promoting indigenous technology, reducing foreign influence, and avoiding excessive reliance on certain manufacturers. Hence, network operators face the new challenge of maintaining high availability and sovereignty. This work aims to guide network operators to assign manufacturers to the nodes in the network cost-effectively, such that both network availability and sovereignty are maximized. A Minimal Cut Set (MCS) of a source-destination pair in a network is the smallest set of components whose failure causes a loss of connectivity between the source-destination pair. In this work, we use MCSs to identify the critical nodes for two purposes. First, we improve network availability by assigning more reliable components to the critical nodes. Second, we improve network sovereignty by assigning different manufacturers to these critical nodes to avoid an overwhelming dependency on a particular manufacturer. Our main contributions are (i) proposing a novel approach based on MCSs to maximize network availability, (ii) proposing the novel Cut Set Diversity (CSD) metric to measure network sovereignty, and (iii) introducing Iroh, a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP), for the hierarchical optimization of network availability and sovereignty. Furthermore, we compare Iroh’s performance with other state-of-the-art methods to maximize network availability and sovereignty. Our results show that Iroh’s manufacturer assignment for availability and sovereignty outperforms heuristics, while matching the state-of-the-art optimization methods despite having only a fraction of their computational complexity.     «

Network availability is a network’s ability to serve all traffic adequately at any instant. Network sovereignty is the network operator’s ability to reduce dependencies on component manufacturers. Recent geopolitical developments have forced several nations to embrace digital autonomy by promoting indigenous technology, reducing foreign influence, and avoiding excessive reliance on certain manufacturers. Hence, network operators face the new challenge of maintaining high availability and soverei...     »