Survivability index for a GPRS network

The GPRS network has been well integrated in global system for mobile (GSM) network, the most dominant cellular standard, to accomplish efficient spectrum utilization for data traffic. It has become a popular service which carries critical business and social information of many subscribers. The issue of survivability for a GPRS network requires more investigation. This work introduces a new measure of survivability, survivability index (SI), which takes into account following important features of a GPRS network (i) success probability in uplink contention, (ii) average wait time to get a dedicated slots (iii) throughput and (iv) availability. A weighted sum form is proposed and genetic algorithm (GA) is used to find optimum values of weights. Considering various failure scenarios the Survivability Index has been evaluated for a GPRS network.