Resilience is an important property of distributed cyber defence systems operating in complex, adversarial environments. While resilience can be realized through self-management, implementing distributed self-management poses several significant challenges. In this paper, we identify some of these challenges and present our initial work on an approach for cyber resilience called AWaRE. The novelty of AWaRE lies in the use of a conceptual, state-space-based design and reconstitution framework, combined with run-time models and distributed constraint satisfaction/optimization techniques for decision-making and coordination of system re-configurations. The run-time models are generated via an expressive domain-specific language enabling component, constraint and agent modeling as well as constraint problem decomposition and architectural self-organization. We realize AWaRE via a concrete software framework, focusing specifically on autonomic self-* properties pertaining to distributed system configuration, deployment and reliable operation. We demonstrate the value of AWaRE in the context of a simple, cloud-based enterprise scenario.

Safety applications based on the dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) in vehicular networks have very strict performance requirements for safety messages (in terms of delay and packet delivery). However, there is a lack of systematic approach to achieve the performance requirements by leveraging the potential of multi-hop forwarding. This paper proposes a generic multi-hop probabilistic forwarding scheme that achieves these requirements for event-driven safety messages, is compatible with the 802.11 broadcasting protocol and inherits some of the best features of solutions proposed so far for vehicular safety applications. In addition, we develop a unified and comprehensive analytical model to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme taking into account the effect of hidden terminals, vehicle densities, and the spatial distribution of the multiple forwarders, in a one-dimensional highway scenario. Our numerical experiments confirm the accuracy of the model and demonstrate that the proposed protocol can improve the packet delivery performance by up to 209 percent, while maintaining the delay well below the required threshold. Finally, the utility of the analytical model is demonstrated via an optimal design for the coefficients of a forwarding probability function in the proposed scheme.

In vehicle-to-vehicle communication, safety messages could be broadcasted over one-hop or multi-hop using different transmission ranges to warn each other of changing conditions or dangers ahead. We investigate the broadcast performance considering one-hop and multi-hop transmissions and study the effect of different transmission ranges on the multi-hop broadcasting performance. Our results show that multi-hop transmission can provide significant performance improvement when the transmission range is chosen appropriately.