摘要：Application process has significant influence on network performance reliability, however, previous studies mainly focus on the impact of network characteristics (such as routing and traffic) on network performance reliability and ignore the influence of application process. In this paper, a multi-tiers model is proposed to capture the process of application. Furthermore, an application paths matrix is proposed to describe all the transmission paths of the application process in the network. Based on the application paths matrix, the boundary of the critical point of the traffic generation rate is derived theoretically, below the lower limit of the boundary the network stays in free-flow state and is reliable, while above the upper limit of the boundary the congestion occurs and the network performance reliability decreases. Furthermore, the effect of the boundary is verified in numerical simulations. The simulation results also show that congestions occurred in middle-tier host nodes could bring more influence on the network performance reliability.
