Maintenance Reliability of a Computer Network with Nodes Failure in the Cloud Computing Environment

With the development of information technology, the cloud computing service has become a new paradigm for the business and industry. In a cloud computing environment, the computer network (CN) can be constructed as a multistate network with several possible states due to failure, partial failure, or maintenance of edges (physical lines) and nodes (switches or routers). In order to guarantee the CN retains a good quality of service, the maintenance action is needed to be taken while the CN falls to a specific state such that it cannot provide sufficient capacity to meet clients’ demand. This paper proposes a performance indicator, the maintenance reliability, to evaluate the capability that a CN can send d units of data from the cloud to the client through multiple minimal paths under both the maintenance budget and time constraints. An adjusting procedure based on the branch-and-bound approach is developed to evaluate the performance indicator. According to different maintenance budgets and the corresponding maintenance reliabilities, the system supervisor could determine a reasonable maintenance budget to maintain the CN for retaining a good quality level.