Survey of network reliability evaluation models and algorithms

Evaluation is the basis of reliability engineering, which mainly deals with physical faults traditionally, but non-physical ones should be considered in network reliability evaluation because of its special characteristics. Because of the complexity of networks, many related parameters, models and algorithms have been proposed since connectivity reliability concept was firstly defined in 1960. This makes the concepts of network reliability and the evaluation algorithms fall into a confuse state. This paper proposes a new three-layer evaluation model based on three different kinds of faults for network reliability, which makes a clear definition of network reliability. Then, current network reliability evaluation algorithms are analyzed for each layer of this model.