OVERALL RELIABILITY DETERMINATION OF COMPUTER-NETWORKS WITH HIERARCHICAL ROUTING STRATEGIES

This paper determines the overall reliability of a computer network in which hierarchical routing strategies are used for the communication between its modes. An exact method is presented which is followed by three fast computer techniques corresponding to three different routing policies. The first two give the exact value for the overall reliability while the third provides a lower bound which is close to the exact reliability value. The main advantages of these techniques are the important savings in computation time and available memory. The developed algorithms are useful in the overall reliability evaluation of large networks or many interconnected subnetworks.