An efficient algorithm for the calculation of node-pair reliability

An algorithm for rapidly calculating the node-pair reliability is described. One application of the algorithm is in communication networks that use flooding for route setup or packet transmission and that have both unreliable links and unreliable nodes. The algorithm is much more efficient than the Dotson algorithm, its main competition, because it uses a much smaller sample space of elementary events, the adjacency matrix rather than an incidence matrix, and a superior algorithm for finding the shortest paths.<<ETX>>