Reliability and Fault‐Tolerant and Delay‐Tolerant Routing

It is essential to understand what reliability means for a network system, the idea behind various concepts related to it, and the different methods that can be adopted to calculate the reliability of various systems. This chapter discusses some of the methods for calculating the reliability of a network. Fault tolerance can be incorporated into a network by having either multiple paths between all source‐destination pairs or spare nodes and redundant links that can replace the failed nodes or links. The use of mobile agent technology as a framework for implementing network management systems is a recent trend. The use of policy‐based network management to delegate management functions and automate decision‐making is also an upcoming area. The routing protocols for a delay‐tolerant network (DTN) require an agent to interconnect incompatible networks, including the rate of communication between the systems. The two prime strategies for routing in DTN are forwarding and flooding.