Monte Carlo network reliability ranking estimation

Topological optimization is an important problem in communication networks. Exact reliability optimization methods are restricted to small problems, or specialized network topologies. For larger problems, simulation-based approaches are more practical. In simulation-based optimization, one often needs to compare the reliability of a large number of similar networks. The traditional reliability estimation & rank process is the most time consuming step of most optimization algorithms. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to directly estimate the reliability ranking of some edge relocated networks without the need to estimate their reliabilities. In the case study considered in this paper, the proposed Synchronous Construction Ranking method achieved over 30,000 times speedup over the traditional approach using the Merge Process estimation algorithm.