Routing policy of stochastic-flow networks under time threshold and budget constraint

The quickest path problem is to find a path which sends a given amount of data from the source to the sink such that the transmission time is minimized. More specifically, the capacity of each arc in the network is assumed to be deterministic. However, in many real-life networks such as computer systems, telecommunication systems, etc., the capacity of each arc is stochastic due to failure, maintenance, etc. Such a network is named a stochastic-flow network. Hence, the minimum transmission time is not a fixed number. The purpose of this paper is to provide a decision procedure for a stochastic-flow network under the time and budget constraints. We try to evaluate the probability that d units of data can be sent through the network under both time threshold and budget according to the routing policy. Such a probability is named the system reliability, which is a performance index to measure the system quality. An efficient algorithm is proposed to derive the optimal routing policy with highest system reliability. The sensitive analysis can be conducted to improve the most important component which increases the system reliability most significantly. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.