Traditionally, communication networks have been
designed to tolerate few link and/or network equipment failures.
With the wide deployment of network infrastructures
and increasingly stringent requirement on network reliability,
the multiple-failure scenario including large-scale damage have
become the major thread to network survivability. Some research
efforts have been recently devoted to the study of network
vulnerability against disaster or power-outage which can make
tens to thousands of network elements unavailable and result in
an unacceptable long service latency and recovery time. However,
the lack of a general measurement on network damage makes
it hard to characterize the effect of such destructive event on
the network infrastructure and service quality. To achieve a
deep understanding on the impact of network damage, this
paper attempts to define degree of network damage (DND), a
measurement used to classify the effect of a destructive event on
network infrastructures, human, and traffic flows. Based on the
disaster intensity scales and a detailed analysis on the effect of
large-scale disasters on a network, we classify the DND into five
scales, in which the lowest scale I represents a weak and short
term destruction while the highest scale V indicates a catastrophic
event causing almost a complete loss of network services. It is
expected that the DND measurement will benefit the disasterresilient
network design, network vulnerability assessment, predisaster
protection, network destruction evaluation as well as
post-disaster recovery.