Abstract

Networks have been widely used in our society and impact our everyday lives in many different aspects. It is imperative that we assure the reliability of every network. Although improving this still remains an open question, research has made some progress.

This tutorial includes three parts.

Part 1: Lessons learned from three cases studies

Three case studies on real-life systems will be discussed. Drawbacks of applying traditional reliability evaluation and enhancement are presented. Possible solutions using advanced technologies are reviewed.

Part 2: Challenges of estimating network reliability

To improve a network’s reliability, we need to first determine when a failure occurs. There are three unique characteristics of network failures: complexity, dynamics, and propagation. Research has been conducted on topics such as failure propagation of complex networks and some statistical modeling and analysis of their failures. We will present how to use an innovative three-layer model to estimate the reliability of a network.

Part 3: Network reliability models and their evaluation

Our three-layer model emphasizes three different reliabilities: connectivity reliability, performance reliability, and application reliability. We will explain how to evaluate each using the results from our recent research.

About the Speakers

Ning Huang received her Ph.D. in 1997. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 2006 to 2007. In 2008, Dr. Huang joined Beihang University. Currently, she is a Full Professor and a Ph.D. supervisor at the School of Reliability and Systems Engineering, Beihang University. She is also a senior member of the China Computer Federation and a member of the IEEE Computer Society.

Dr. Huang’s research interests focus on network reliability, software reliability, and software testing. She is working on technologies to evaluate and improve network reliabilities (especially communication networks) by incorporating features such as fault propagation, as well as coupling between software and hardware.

She has served as a principal investigator of more than 10 research projects sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Foundation, Beijing Natural Foundation, Rong Hong International Collaborative Research Foundation, etc., and has published more than 100 conference and journal papers.

Xiaoyang Li is an associate professor at the School of Reliability and Systems Engineering, Beihang University. And also, she is the executive director of Center for resilience and safety of critical infrastructure. She received her PhD degree in Aerospace Systems Engineering from Beihang University in 2007 and visited the IMS center of University of Cincinnati from 2010- 2011. Her research interests include reliability of cloud data center, reliability testing and modeling, and resilience modeling and evaluation. She is the PIs of about 15 funding and projects, including National Science foundation of China, the sub-project of National Program on Key Basic Research, etc. Now, she published about 30 SCI indexed academic papers focused on reliability testing and owned more than 20 authorized patents.

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