Abstract: With the development of the network technology, network reliability evaluation has been a hot research topic in these years. 13ut the traditional reliability evaluation methods arc hard to be applyied to network evaluation due to the complexity, dynamic and multi-state characteristics of a network. This paper divided the related literatures into three main types; connecting reliability, capacity reliability and performance reliability, and introduced the new application reliability which is based on the three types of reliability and considers the service support capacity of a network, then reviewed the research progress and the existing problems. Finally, the direction of future research was discussed.

Key words: Network reliability, Reliability evaluation, Topology model, Network flow, Network application