Network resilience: a measure of network fault tolerance

A probabilistic measure of network fault tolerance expressed as the probability of a disconnection is proposed. Qualitative evaluation of this measure is presented. As expected, the single-node disconnection probability is the dominant factor irrespective of the topology under consideration. The authors derive an analytical approximation to the disconnection probability and verify it with a Monte Carlo simulation. On the basis of this model, the measures of network resilience and relative network resilience are proposed as probabilistic measures of network fault tolerance. These are used to evaluate the effects of the disconnection probability on the reliability of the system