An Alternative Index for the Reliability of Telecommunication Networks

A new index for evaluating the reliability of telecommunication networks compares the effectiveness of the modelled actual system with that for an ideal (absolutely failureless) system. The new index is not only general, in that it takes account of all the states and the number of channels between vertices, but the procedure for its calculation allows more consistent choice of the special indexes of reliability. Some previous indexes can be derived from this as special cases.