Dependability of a Network Monitoring Hardware

Abstract

System dependability plays an important role in the realization of computer communication infrastructures and the everyday operations and maintenance of computer networks. Increased redundancy is used as a common practice to improve dependability, however in some cases duplication of a networking equipment is not desirable due to high cost or increased system complexity as a result of handling potentially duplicated data. In such cases a single point of failure exists. In this paper we first present a highly dependable networking hardware architecture and demonstrate its application in a monitoring example then we provide a detailed dependability analysis for the hardware used in monitoring application.