Reliability engineering for future telecommunication networks and services

This paper summarises the results of EURESCOM project EU-S26, a fact-finding study to determine the current state-of-the art on network reliability engineering. The objective is to identify reliability threats of future networks and services for which measures to deal with these threats are not available (yet). First, we present an overview of the faults and failures that threaten the reliability of future service provisioning, network management and the physical network. These are mainly software related. Then, possible measures against these reliability threats are discussed. Finally, we present the conclusions of the fact-finding study and indicate directions of future research