Reliability and Availability Modelling of Telecommunication Servers on Cloud

Abstract

Reliability and availability considerations are discussed in this paper with special focus on ‘cloud based’ Mobile Switching and Application Servers (MSS and AS). Before the extensive deployment of cloud based telecom networks an essential question shall be answered: Will cloud technology ensure the ‘carrier grade’ requirements that are well established and proven on ‘legacy telecommunications’ hardware? This paper shows the possible redundancy principles and a simulation method to predict availability for ‘cloudified’ mobile communication network elements. As a calculation example, Nokia AS on ‘telco-cloud’ is presented, that combines several redundancy principles such as full protection (2N), load sharing and standby.