Sequential Monte Carlo for Network Resilience Assessment and Control

Abstract

Resilience is emerging as a key requirement for next-generation wireless communication systems, requiring the ability to assess and control rare, path-dependent failure events arising from sequential degradation and delayed recovery. In this work, we develop a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) framework for resilience assessment and control in networked systems. Resilience failures are formulated as staged, path-dependent events and represented through a reaction-coordinate-based decomposition that captures the progression toward non-recovery. Building on this structure, we propose a multilevel splitting approach with fixed, semantically interpretable levels and a budget-adaptive population control mechanism that dynamically allocates computational effort under a fixed total simulation cost. The framework is further extended to incorporate mitigation policies by leveraging SMC checkpoints for policy evaluation, comparison, and state-contingent selection via simulation-based lookahead. A delay-critical wireless network use case is considered to demonstrate the approach. Numerical results show that the proposed SMC method significantly outperforms standard Monte Carlo in estimating rare non-recovery probabilities and enables effective policy-driven recovery under varying system conditions. The results highlight the potential of SMC as a practical tool for resilience-oriented analysis and control in future communication systems.