Evaluating Reliability/Survivability of Capacitated Wireless Networks

In telecommunication network design problems, survivability and reliability are often used to evaluate quality of service while usually ignoring link capacity. In this paper, a new metric that combines network reliability with network resilience is presented to measure reliability/survivability effectively for capacitated networks. Capacitated resilience is compared with well-known network reliability/survivability metrics (k-terminal reliability, all-terminal reliability, traffic efficiency, and k-connectivity), and its benefits and computational efficiency are discussed. An application is shown using heterogeneous wireless networks (HetNets). With the growing use of new telecommunication technologies such as 4G and wireless hotspots, HetNets are gaining more attention. The source of heterogeneity of a HetNet can either be the differences in nodes (such as transmission ranges, failure rates, and energy levels) or the differences in services offered in the network (such as GSM and WiFi).