Reliability measures and their approximate evaluations for networksand distributed systems

摘要

Approximate evaluations of various reliability measures forcomputer networks and distributed systems are derived using a uniformapproach that finds set path-strings for the favorable events ofinterest. The path-strings are processed by a reliability evaluationalgorithm based on paths and cutsets. During each iteration of thealgorithm lower bounds and upper bounds are computed. Using the improvedsymbolic reliability algorithm (ISYREL), the first k paths inthe kth iteration are used to compute the reliability measureof interest. An advantage of this approach is that the result of kth iteration provides a lower bound from which an upper bound canbe calculated, consuming only one additional path in each iteration.This process can be stopped when enough accuracy has been obtained orwhen enough computation power has been invested