Reliability Performance Aware Routing

In communication networks, a device failure is never a desired event, as it can interrupt multiple connections and disturb transmission of large amount of data and thus decrease connection reliability performance. The approaches used to ensure high connection reliability performance focus mainly on minimizing the impact due to a device failure by using backup resources. These approaches commonly assume the reliability performance of a device to be constant. However, it is known that the device reliability performance is related to its level of occupancy. In this article we leverage on this relation and propose a novel routing algorithm referred to as: device reliability performance aware routing (RAR) that allows for significant reduction of the number of device failures and connection reconfigurations in the network. The proposed RAR algorithm is evaluated using simulations and compared to the shortest path (SP) approach. Evaluation results show that RAR can provide significant benefits comparing to the SP approach. The number of device failures can be reduced by similar to 20% while the number of connection reconfigurations caused by the failure of a device can be reduced by similar to 30%.