Among critical infrastructures, power grids and communication infrastructure are identified as uniquely critical since they enable the operation of all other sectors. Due to their vital role, the research community has undertaken extensive efforts to understand the complex dynamics and resilience characteristics of these infrastructures, albeit independently. However, power and communication infrastructures are also interconnected, and the nature of the Internet's dependence on power grids is poorly understood. In this paper, we take the first step toward characterizing the role of power grids in Internet resilience by analyzing the overlap of global power and Internet infrastructures. We investigate the impact of power grid failures on Internet availability and find that nearly $65\%$ of the public Internet infrastructure components are concentrated in a few ($< 10$) power grid failure zones. More importantly, power grid dependencies severely limit the number of disjoint availability zones of cloud providers. When dependency on grids serving data center locations is taken into account, the number of isolated AWS Availability Zones reduces from 87 to 19. Building upon our findings, we develop NetWattZap, an Internet resilience analysis tool that generates power grid dependency-aware deployment suggestions for Internet infrastructure and application components, which can also take into account a wide variety of user requirements.

翻译：在关键基础设施中，电网与通信基础设施被认定为具有独特关键性，因为它们支撑着所有其他领域的运行。由于其至关重要的作用，学术界已投入大量努力来理解这些基础设施的复杂动态及韧性特征——尽管通常是分别进行研究。然而，电力与通信基础设施实际上是相互关联的，而互联网对电网的依赖本质尚未得到充分理解。本文首次通过分析全球电力与互联网基础设施的重叠区域，迈出表征电网在互联网韧性中作用的第一步。我们研究了电网故障对互联网可用性的影响，发现近65%的公共互联网基础设施组件集中在少数（少于10个）电网故障区域。更重要的是，电网依赖严重限制了云服务商可用区的数量。当考虑对数据中心所在电网的依赖时，独立AWS可用区的数量从87个降至19个。基于研究发现，我们开发了NetWattZap——一种互联网韧性分析工具，可为互联网基础设施及应用组件生成考虑电网依赖性的部署建议，同时能适应广泛的用户需求。