Availability Analysis of Load-Sharing Systems

Markov reward models [1] lend themselves naturally to a unified reliability and performance analysis of load-sharing systems. However, reliability and performance analyses are often done independently without realizing that the performance analyst's results should be used to assign rewards in the reliability analyst's Markov chains. A common practice ignores performance/traffic analysis and assumes that a state's reward is N sub i/N, where N sub i is the number of surviving units in state i and N is the total number of units in a load-sharing system [2]. This simplistic approach typically produces a more vigorous reward assignment process that compares rewards from different perspectives and incorporates the effects of time-varying traffic on load-sharing systems.