To evaluate the expected availability of a backbone network service, the administrator should consider all possible failure scenarios under the specific service availability model stipulated in the corresponding service-level agreement. Given the increase in natural disasters and malicious attacks with geographically extensive impact, considering only independent single component failures is often insufficient. This paper builds a stochastic model of geographically correlated link failures caused by disasters to estimate the hazards an optical backbone network may be prone to and to understand the complex correlation between possible link failures. We first consider link failures only and later extend our model also to capture node failures. With such a model, one can quickly extract essential information such as the probability of an arbitrary set of network resources to fail simultaneously, the probability of two nodes to be disconnected, the probability of a path to survive a disaster. Furthermore, we introduce standard data structures and a unified terminology on Probabilistic Shared Risk Link Groups (PSRLGs), along with a pre-computation process, which represents the failure probability of a set of resources succinctly. In particular, we generate a quasilinear-sized data structure in polynomial time, which allows the efficient computation of the cumulative failure probability of any set of network elements. Our evaluation is based on carefully pre-processed seismic hazard data matched to real-world optical backbone network topologies.

In order to evaluate the expected availability of a service, a network administrator should consider all possible failure scenarios under the specific service availability model stipulated in the corresponding service-level agreement. Given the increase in natural disasters and malicious attacks with geographically extensive impact, considering only independent single link failures is often insufficient. In this paper, we build a stochastic model of geographically correlated link failures caused by disasters, in order to estimate the hazards a network may be prone to, and to understand the complex correlation between possible link failures. With such a model, one can quickly extract information, such as the probability of an arbitrary set of links to fail simultaneously, the probability of two nodes to be disconnected, the probability of a path to survive a failure, etc. Furthermore, we introduce a pre-computation process, which enables us to succinctly represent the joint probability distribution of link failures. In particular, we generate, in polynomial time, a quasilinear-sized data structure, with which the joint failure probability of any set of links can be computed efficiently.