A decomposition technique for the overall reliability evaluation of large computer communication networks
Abstract A funtamental consideration in the design of a computer network is the determination of its overall reliability. For large computer networks the exact evaluation of overall reliability is prohibitive because of the complexity of the computations involved. In this paper an approximate technique for the overall reliability determination is proposed which is based on the m-hierarchical clustering of a network. By this approach a close lower bound for the exact overall reliability can always be obtained with important savings in computation time and available memory.