How Reliable Can Two-Path Protection Be?

This paper investigates the subject of reliability via two link-disjoint paths in mesh networks. We address the issues of how reliable two-path protection can be and how to achieve the maximum reliability. This work differs from traditional studies, such as MIN-SUM, MIN-MAX, and MIN-MIN, in that the objective in this paper is to maximize the reliability of the two-path connection given the link reliability, or equivalently, to minimize the end-to-end failure probability. We refer to this problem as MAX-REL. Solving MAX-REL provides 100% protection against a single failure while maximizing the reliability regardless of how many link failures occur in the network. We prove that this problem is NP-complete and derive a corresponding upper bound, which is the theoretical maximum reliability for a source-destination pair, and a lower bound, which is the worst case of the proposed algorithm. The time efficiency of the algorithms is analyzed, and the performance of the algorithms is evaluated through simulation. We demonstrate that our heuristic algorithms not only achieve a low computing complexity, but also achieve nearly equivalent performance to the upper bound.