Reliability and availability modeling of coupled communication networks: a simplified modeling approach

Various simplification methods are discussed, and they are applied to various local area network (LAN) and extended LAN models to illustrate their power in reducing the complexity of otherwise nearly intractable communications network models. In the case of coupled networks a technique that allows for problem decomposition is used. The authors begin in a top-down fashion and assume that the network coupling elements (bridges) fail in a few simple modes, initially just good or bad. They can then decouple (decompose) the problem into a combination of bridge and LAN subsystems and formulate a reliability block diagram or fault tree to represent the entire system