Exact and Scalable Network Reliability Evaluation for Probabilistic Correlated Failures

Abstract

Network reliability, that is, the probability of con-necting specified nodes under link failures, is a key metric of network infrastructure. Because network reliability evaluation is a computationally heavy task, past research has relied on unre-alistically simple failure models such as the independent failure model, wherein each link fails stochastically and independently, ignoring large-scale failures such as disasters, or the deterministic-correlated failure model, wherein all links within a disaster area always fail. However, actual networks follow the probabilistic-correlated (PC) failure model, wherein links in a disaster area fail stochastically with respect to each disaster. This paper proposes an efficient method to accurately compute network reliability under the PC model. Following a conventional method for the independent model, the proposed method uses binary decision diagrams (BDDs) to efficiently handle an exponential number of failure states. Additionally, it employs a probabilistic inference technique to support probabilistic correlation, which is represented as another BDD for integration with the conventional method. The computational complexity was theoretically analyzed, and its performance was experimentally verified; it can compute the network reliability within 1 h for a large network with nearly 200 links and 100 potential disasters.