Reliability analysis of a wireless transmission as a repairable system

Reliability of wireless transmission has been identified as an instrumental property in future 5G wireless systems due to the service expansion of 3GPP networks into domains such as Automotive and Industry. Apriori indication of the availability of the transmission link would enable opportunistic scheduling of safety critical services/applications when the link conditions are fair enough. Traditional reliability engineering methods such as Reliability Block Diagrams (RBD´S), life distributions and fault trees etc. can be used to predict the link availability. However, these methods can only be applied to binary states (up and down) and are more suitable for non-repairable systems only. This paper introduces the reliability analysis of the wireless transmission by considering the wireless transmission as a renewal process with arbitrary failure(A) and repair(/i) rates. Reliable service composition (graceful degradation of the service´s reliability requirements) has also been introduced by employing multi-state markov chains. To this end, this paper also introduces two new Key Performance Indicators (KPI´s) - Point Availability (PA) and Reliability Function R(t) for the reliability analysis of the transmission.