Evaluating Reliability of Telecommunications Networks Using Traffic Path Information

We propose a reliability model for representing telecommunications networks that does not focus on topological information, but rather traffic path information. Mapping from traffic paths to physical elements and capacities enables the model to express simply how terrible performance degradations occur. Existing models, such as probability graph models, and probability-capacity graph models, do not adequately address actual telecommunication network designs. The probability graph model never considers performance degradations, while the probability-capacity model unreasonably assumes that we can estimate performance degradations from only the network topology. This paper also proposes an algorithm for evaluating the reliability of our new model. A numerical example shows that the algorithm is reasonably efficient for even large telecommunications networks.