Network communications can easily be disrupted by the failure of networking equipment, ranging from a single accidental link cut, to a wide swath of links and nodes wiped out simultaneously by a natural disaster. To mitigate the impact of these failures, survivability solutions involving precomputed backup paths can be used to help maintain connectivity and reduce service downtime. Further improvements to reliability can be gained through the use of Content Centric Networking (CCN). CCN is an alternative networking paradigm that puts the focus on efficiently providing consumers access over the network to content held by producers. This content can range from viral videos to important experiment data or military documents. Consumers send out interest messages, addressed by the name of the content they are looking for, and CCN routers record that interest and forward the message towards known producers that hold that content. As content is returned from a producer, it can be cached at the intermediate routers, allowing that content to be replicated and forwarded out to all known consumers asking for that content. This process, while potentially costly in terms of storage cost, can greatly improve access to content after failure strikes the network. Even if the original producer that offered the content is disconnected, some of the content can still be reached if one or more of the intermediate routers survived.

With the potential survivability benefits of CCN in mind, this work proposes a number of linear programming and heuristic solutions for provisioning survivable sets of routes from any number of consumers to any number of producers. These routes are designed to be protected, if possible, against any specified number of failures in a flexible failure set, which can contain both links and nodes. Each consumer can be provided a primary route, implemented through setting up forwarding rules in advance, and can switch to one or more backup routes should the primary route become disconnected. We combine these survivable routes with failure-aware caching algorithms to determine where content can be most effectively cached to improve post-failure access. The protection provided can vary based on the use case, ranging from protecting against any single link failure, to ensuring that consumers in one region of the network can still access content after an entire portion of the network is damaged by a hurricane. The proposed solutions are evaluated against several baseline algorithms from the literature, showing the value in providing flexible survivability solutions that can scale the level of protection provided up or down based on the requirements.