An approach to designing a high availability transmission network

The reliability of a network is an important factor in the customer´s perception of the quality of service provided. Moreover it is becoming increasingly common to have some minimum reliability criteria contractually specified for services offered to business customers. It is therefore important that any new network should have good reliability properties designed into it from its inception. The paper presents an approach to designing a reliable transmission network and outlines some of the inherent pitfalls in the methods adopted