Traffic performance and network availability

The analysis of the performance of telecommunication networks in fault conditions is an essential step when comparing the merits of alternative configurations. The degradations in service caused by node or link failures are often confined to a portion of the traffic flowing in the network, and it is not easy to form a view of the behaviour of the network as a whole. A method in which the network traffic is considered as a number of individual streams, and in which the results of analysing the performance encountered by these streams are presented in tabular form, is discussed. The considerations are confined to circuit switched networks but it is believed that they could be extended for other forms of network