Redundancy is widely used to sustain service continuity in programmable and virtualized networks; however, replicated functions often share platforms, software stacks, and control dependencies, making them vulnerable to correlated failures. Consequently, replica counts alone may overestimate true resilience. This paper adopts a degeneracy-aware perspective, where robustness depends on the availability of structurally diverse yet functionally equivalent alternatives. We formalize this perspective through three complementary metrics: the Functional Substitution Score (FSS), which quantifies structurally distinct substitutes for a function; the Algorithmic Resilience Quotient (ARQ), which measures diversity among algorithms that remain comparable in delivered performance; and the Multi-Layer Degeneracy Index (MLDI), which captures how functional diversity is distributed across architectural layers. Using targeted disruption protocols on a synthesized data, we show that redundancy and robustness can diverge substantially. The results show that FSS separates structural diversity from replica count, ARQ distinguishes genuine algorithmic alternatives from near-duplicate implementations, and MLDI captures cross-layer buffering that remains hidden under redundancy-only analysis. These findings establish degeneracy as a practical resilience primitive for open, disaggregated, and virtualized 6G systems.

翻译：冗余被广泛用于保障可编程与虚拟化网络中的业务连续性；然而，复制的功能常共享平台、软件栈及控制依赖关系，使其易受关联故障影响。因此，仅凭副本数量可能高估真实弹性。本文采用简并感知视角，认为鲁棒性取决于结构多样化但功能等效替代方案的可用性。我们通过三个互补指标形式化这一视角：功能替代分数（FSS）量化函数的结构性不同替代物；算法弹性商（ARQ）衡量在交付性能上保持可比性的算法间的多样性；多层简并指数（MLDI）捕捉功能多样性在架构层间的分布。通过针对合成数据实施定向破坏协议，我们证明冗余与鲁棒性可能显著背离。结果表明：FSS将结构多样性与副本数量分离，ARQ区分真实算法替代方案与近乎重复的实现，MLDI捕获纯冗余分析中隐藏的跨层缓冲机制。这些发现确立了简并性作为开放、解耦与虚拟化6G系统实用弹性基元的地位。