Resilience in IMS: End-to-end reliability analysis via Markov Reward Models

Reliability evaluation of systems has been widely researched for improving system resilience especially in designing processes of a complex system. The convergence of different access networks is possible via IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) for development toward Next Generation Networks (NGNs) and supporting always on services. Therefore, not only Quality of Service (QoS) but also resilience is required. In this paper, we attempt to evaluate and analyze end-to-end reliability of the IMS system using a model proposed as a combination of Reliability Block Diagram (RBD) and Markov Reward Models (MRMs). The resilience of the IMS architecture is studied by applying 1:1 redundancy at different communication scenarios between end users within and across communication domains. The model analysis provides useful reliability characteristics of the system and can be further applied for system design processes.