Hierarchical approach to performance analysis of self-healing SONET networks

The performance evaluation of large self-healing SONET mesh networks is of great interest to the telecom industry. In this paper, we first modify a model that has been proposed originally for the reliability analysis of SONET networks, for the performance evaluation of such networks. Then, we propose a hierarchical approach that will not only reduce the complexity of the analysis, but also improve the accuracy. The sensitivity of the performance metrics to the traffic distribution and the performance of individual subnetworks are studied experimentally.