Improving reliability through architecture partitioning in telecommunication networks

The paper presents a new switching architecture to improve telecommunications reliability. The architecture is partitioned depending on the type of network used, reliability requirements, and expected traffic in the network. The partition size depends on the network reliability, bandwidth, and traffic. A reliability model for a telecommunication architecture is used to partition the network and to improve end-to-end reliability. The model defines critical components in the networking architecture and their connections. The component connections permit the propagation of faults from the component in which the fault originates to the other components. This propagation can cause failures in the chain (or in the tree) of components. The partitioned architecture limits the propagation of faults, simplifies fault detection, and preserves reliability of the remaining partitions. Examples of different networks are used to show the applications of the model. >