Sterbenz, James P.G.Alenazi, Mohammed Jumah2016-01-012016-01-012015-05-312015http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:13924https://hdl.handle.net/1808/19376Computer networks are getting more involved in providing services for most of our daily life activities related to education, business, health care, social life, and government. Publicly available computer networks are prone to targeted attacks and natural disasters that could disrupt normal operation and services. Building highly resilient networks is an important aspect of their design and implementation. For existing networks, resilience against such challenges can be improved by adding more links. In fact, adding links to form a full mesh yields the most resilient network but it incurs an unfeasibly high cost. In this research, we investigate the resilience improvement of real-world networks via adding a cost-efficient set of links. Adding a set of links to an obtain optimal solution using an exhaustive search is impracticable for large networks. Using a greedy algorithm, a feasible solution is obtained by adding a set of links to improve network connectivity by increasing a graph robustness metric such as algebraic connectivity or total graph diversity. We use a graph metric called flow robustness as a measure for network resilience. To evaluate the improved networks, we apply three centrality-based attacks and study their resilience. The flow robustness results of the attacks show that the improved networks are more resilient than the non-improved networks.232 pagesenCopyright held by the author.Computer scienceComputer engineeringBackbone NetworksComputer NetworksGraph RobustnessGraph TheoryNetwork ResilienceDissertationopenAccess