Sequential Monte Carlo for Resilient Networks: Assessment, Mitigation, and Generative Modeling
For network engineers and researchers, this work provides a more efficient method to estimate rare failure probabilities in complex wireless systems, though it is an incremental application of existing SMC techniques to a new domain.
This paper develops a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) framework for assessing resilience in wireless networks, enabling efficient estimation of rare non-recovery probabilities. The method substantially improves over standard Monte Carlo in rare-event regimes, demonstrated in a delay-critical wireless network use case.
Resilience is becoming crucial for future wireless networks, which must withstand, adapt to, and recover from rare but potentially cascading disruptions. This paper develops a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) simulation framework for such systems, in which resilience failures are formulated as path-dependent rare events arising from staged degradation and delayed recovery, and are decomposed into semantically interpretable levels defined by a reaction coordinate. Building on this structure, we present a fixed-level splitting approach with budget-aware population control, enabling efficient estimation of rare non-recovery probabilities. We discuss the potential reuse of SMC checkpoints as representative near-critical states for policy evaluation and simulation-based selection. We further extend the methodology to learned stochastic simulation by using generative sequence models as restartable surrogates within data-driven digital twins. We showcase the framework in a delay-critical wireless network use case, where SMC substantially improves over standard Monte Carlo in rare-event regimes with both physical and learned simulators.