Essence of Geographically Correlated Failure Events in Communication Networks

Modeling and listing the joint device failures of telecommunication optical backbone networks caused by large-scale regional disasters is the aim of my dissertation [1] digested in the following. The use-cases of these failure lists include helping the operators of modern telecommunication networks to meet the predefined Quality-of-Service (QoS) conditions. Informally speaking, the task tackled is translating the composed geometric problem of protecting telecommunication networks against regional failures to small-sized purely combinatorial and probabilistic problems, respectively. The development of this translation framework relied on the following pillars: 1) constructing failure models that make the best use of the data available, 2) giving fast algorithms for determining the resulting failure lists, 3) providing a theoretical and practical analysis of the complexity of the algorithms and the properties of the failure lists. The offered failure lists can be leveraged for enhancing network preparedness against disasters.