A reliability enhancement approach for computer networks and distributed applications

The authors address an important problem in reliability improvement of existing distributed systems. The reliability of a distributed system depends not only on the reliabilities of its communication links and computing elements, but also on the distribution of its resources which consists of programs and data files. A genetic algorithm based reliability improvement approach is discussed for distributed systems under a given budget constraint. The reliability parameters of a distributed system considered are terminal reliability and computer network reliability. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the genetic algorithm based approach, the results obtained from the proposed approach are compared with the optimal solutions computed using exhaustive search.<>