Author(s)

E. Ciancamerla & M. Minichino

Abstract

Modern society increasingly depends on communication networks, usually born for not critical aims and nowadays used more and more for critical infrastructure protection. In the automotive domain, Tele Control Systems (TCS), based on communication networks, are proposed in prototypal fashion, for protection of critical transport infrastructures, such as long bridges and tunnels. TCS typically consist of one or more Traffic Control Centres (TCC), allocated near the infrastructure, interconnected to vehicles to be controlled, by a wireless communication network, even public (PMN - Public Mobile Network). PMN is the heart of TCS and makes it more vulnerable due to many factors, such as complexity, mobility of nodes, response time and public access to the network. The paper focuses on a PMN that supports both Global System Mobile (GSM) and General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) connections, for voice and data transmissions between instrumented vehicles and TCC. Particularly, we present a GPRS model, based on Stochastic Activity Networks formalism, to compute PMN dependability measures, as well as some numerical results, in the framework of validation by modelling of the related TCS. The GPRS model is a composed model that joins two modular sub models, respectively representing PMN availability and performance aspects. Keywords: infrastructure protection, public mobile network, General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), stochastic model, dependability, availability, performance. 1 Introduction The paper deals with dependability measures of a Public Mobile Network (PMN), the heart of a Tele Control System (TCS) that has the aim of reducing

Keywords

infrastructure protection, public mobile network, General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), stochastic model, dependability, availability, performance.