Reliability Evaluation for an Information Network With Node Failure Under Cost Constraint

  • Authors:

  • Yi-Kuei Lin

  • Affiliations:

  • Dept. of Ind. Manage., Nat. Taiwan Univ. of Sci. & Technol., Taipei

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

The quality of service is an important index to measure the performance of an information system. This paper constructs a stochastic-flow network to model the information system. In this network, each node and arc having a designated capacity will have different lower levels due to various partial and complete failures. The studied problem is to evaluate the possibility that a given amount of multicommodity can be sent through an information network under the cost constraint. Such a possibility, which is named the mission reliability, is an appropriate performance index to measure the quality level. The terminology "flow" represents the quantity of data transmitted via such a network, and "demand" represents the required data from clients. Based on the properties of minimal paths, a simple algorithm is first proposed to generate all lower boundary points for the demand; then, the mission reliability can be calculated in terms of such points. The lower boundary point for the demand is a minimal vector, which represents the capacity of each component (arc or node), such that the demand can be fulfilled. Extending the stochastic-flow network to the node failure case, another algorithm is proposed to calculate the mission reliability