Analysis of area-to-area cascading failure rate for telecommunications networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a new measure to analyze the effects of countermeasures against cascading failures on telecommunications networks. Cascading failures affect wide areas and are caused by successive failures of equipment. The trigger is a small failure. Existing measures are reasonable from a bird's eye perspective. However, some pairs of nodes are very important from the perspective of national security or for other reasons. The bird's eye perspective ignores such pairs. The proposed measure enables us to analyze cascading failures without ignoring such important node pairs.