Characterizing the Spread of Correlated Failures in Large Wireless Networks

Correlated failures pose a great challenge for the normal functioning of large wireless networks, because an initial local failure may trigger a global sequence of related failures. Given their potentially devastating impact, we characterize the spread of correlated failures in this paper, which lays the foundation for evaluating and improving the failure resilience of existing wireless networks. We model the failure contagiousness as two generic functions: the failure impact radius distribution function f_r(x) and the failure connection function g(x). By using the percolation theory, we determine the respective characteristic regimes of f_r(x) and g(x) in which correlated failures will and will not percolate in the network. As our model represents various failure scenarios, the results are generally applicable in understanding the spread of a wide range of correlated failures.