Composite performance and availability analysis of communications networks. A comparison of exact and approximate approaches

The traditional pure performance model that ignores failure and recovery but considers resource contention generally overestimates the system´s ability to perform a certain job. On the other hand, pure availability analysis tends to be too conservative since performance considerations are not taken into account. To obtain realistic composite performance and availability measures, one should consider performance changes that are associated with failure recovery behavior. In this paper, a brief review is first given of the advances in composite performance and availability analysis. Then three techniques for composite performance and availability analysis are discussed in detail through a queueing system in a wireless communications network