Sensitivity analysis of availability of redundancy in computer networks

Abstract—In this paper, we investigate the availability modeling of computer networks with redundancy mechanisms. Sensitivity analysis is applied in order to find the bottlenecks of system availability. We use Markov chains for the analytical evaluation of complex scenarios. We apply our proposed modeling approach in a case study to evaluate how sensitive dependability is to failure and recovery times of different components in an enterprise network. The influence of network topologies is also considered in our case study. Keywords—Availability; Markov Chains; Sensitivity analysis; Computer network