Polynomial-Time Topological Reductions That Preserve the Diameter Constrained Reliability of a Communication Network

We propose a polynomial-time algorithm for detecting and deleting classes of network edges which are irrelevant in the evaluation of the Source-to-terminal Diameter Constrained Network reliability parameter. As evaluating this parameter is known to be an NP-hard problem, the proposed procedure may lead to important computational gains when combined with an exact method to calculate the reliability. For illustration, we integrate this algorithm within an exact recursive factorization approach based upon Moskowitz's edge decomposition. Experiments conducted on different real-world topologies confirmed a substantial computational gain, except when highly-dense graphs were tested.