Analysis of Connection Survivability in Complex Strategic Communications Networks

Military communications networks have to retain their connectivity when subject to quite severe damage. The "survivability" of such networks is conveniently defined by the probability of retaining a connection between representative pairs of terminals. Many methods of calculating this parameter analytically, or of estimating it statistically, have been published. However, because of the "combinatorial explosion," none have so far proved viable except for relatively simple networks (and often also unjustifiable implicit assumptions). A new approach is therefore developed in this paper, which reduces the computational load by several orders of magnitude, and makes significant practical networks amenable to analysis.