Maintenance and Operating Characteristics of Communication Networks

The communication facilities of a communication network constitute a stochastic service system. To maintain such a network, an optimal distribution of the given manpower to stations is desirable, and this paper considers such a distribution under the assumption that the maintenance capability of an m-man team is m^r (O ≦ r ≦ 1) times the maintenance capability of a single-man team. The method employed is the Lagrange multiplier, which, aided by charts, produces optimal numbers of service windows as well as numbers of men to be assigned. Finally, for known statistical maintenance data, the paper considers operating characteristics of the network such as average up time and down time, average number of renewals (ups or downs) in an interval [0, T], availability, restoration rate, failure rate of a connection, etc.