Common Cause Failures in Communication Networks

Upcoming communication networks are designed to provide a variety of mission-critical applications, so they are subject to strict dependability and survivability requirements, to meet which redundancy is usually used. However, the effect of its use can be significantly reduced by common cause failures, leading to the simultaneous outages of several or even many network elements. Therefore, an analysis of such failures is necessary. The article proposes a method that takes into account the possibility of common cause failures when calculating network availability. In addition, the concept of a shared risk resource group is considered, as well as the alarm correlation in fault management systems that are directly related to common cause failures.