Dependability Issues in Smart Networks

The dependency of society and business on telecommunication services is commonly recognized, but is this conception taken into account in our effort towards smarter and more autonomous networks? The objective of the paper is to discuss some dependability issues in the context of these networks and to pinpoint some challenges. As an introduction, a brief review of dependability concepts is given. Next the following issues are discussed: a) strategies for providing a survivable transport network; b) fault-tolerant network nodes vs. faulttolerant functionality on a distributed platform; c) software faults and their consequences like error propagation and network wide failure modes.