Reliable service provisioning in converged multimedia network environment

For new service provisioning and flexible network management, diverse heterogeneous networks are converged to a packet-based network with the help of service and control platforms. These platforms, which are shared with several services, perform service provisioning-related functions and manipulate network resources on transport systems to provision services requested from users. Under the converged network circumstance, even a single control system failure affects all services supported by the failed system. It is obvious that a convergence environment requires higher level of reliability than legacy service networks. Previous studies on reliability most focus on how to improve reliability of systems or how to compute reliability of services. The purpose of this paper, instead, is to present a way to compute the required reliability of systems with redundancy policy for satisfying the target reliability of services under the converged network circumstance. Using the proposed method we exemplified the required reliability of control systems and their redundancy ratio for satisfying certain level of reliability of services. The proposed method is expected to give a guideline for planning service and control platforms in consideration of economic efficiency that leverages the level of reliability. (c) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.