An extended lifetime measure for telecommunications networks: Improvements and implementations

Predicting the lifetime of a network is a stochastic and very hard task. Sensitivity analysis of a network in order to identify the weakest points in the network, provides valuable knowledge to draw an optimum investment strategy for the expansion of the networks for the network carriers. To achieve this goal, a new measure, called topology lifetime, was recently proposed for measuring the performance of a telecommunication network. This measure not only allows to perform a sensitivity analysis of the networks, but also it provides the means to compare the different topologies with respect to the ability of the network in supporting growth in network traffic before new capacity/facility is installed. This paper addresses some improvements upon the previously defined measures and presents the implementation results of the various lifetime measure methodologies. Computational analysis on some commonly used topologies show how the new measure can be utilized in assessing network performance.