Locating a Broadcast Source in a Tree Network with Complex Unreliability

Abstract

In an unreliable communication network, failures may occur to nodes and/or links. The problem of finding a source for data broadcast on the network can be reduced to the problem of computing a most reliable source of the network. Previous studies focused on the case of either edge failures or node failures. In this paper, we study a more general case, where each node has an independent transmitting probability and an independent receiving probability while each link has an independent operational probability, called the complex unreliability. Our aim is to compute a node, which maximizes its minimum reachability, called an Maximin most reliable source (Maximin_MRS) of the network. For a tree network with the complex unreliability, we employ a two-stage dynamic programming method to design a linear time algorithm for computing an Maximin_MRS of this network.