A Normal Copula Model for the Economic Risk Analysisof Correlated Failures in Communications Networks

The reliability of a communications network is often evaluated withouttaking into account the economic consequence of failures. Here a new approach isproposed to assess the economic consequences of failures as a figure of merit of reliablenetworks. For this purpose a partition of the network operator’s market into servicebasins is proposed, which includes the presence of correlation between the subsystemsneeded to serve different service basins as well as within the same service basin. Asimulation algorithm, based on the Cross-Entropy method, is fully described to evaluatethe probability that the economic loss exceeds a given threshold. An application of themethod to a simple scenario is finally reported