Improving Dependability of Real-Time Communication with Preplanned Backup Routes and Spare Resource Pool

Abstract

Timely recovery from network component failures is essential to the applications that require guaranteed-performance communication services. To achieve dependable communication, there have been several proposals that can be classified into two categories: reactive and proactive.

The reactive approach tries to reroute traffic upon detection of a network link/node failure. This approach may suffer from contention and resource shortage when multiple connections need to be rerouted at the same time. The proactive approach, on the other hand, prepares a backup channel in advance that will be activated upon failure of the corresponding primary channel due to a broken link or node. The proactive approach, although it offers higher dependability, incurs higher routing overhead than the reactive approach.

We propose a hybrid approach that reduces signaling overhead by decoupling backup routing from resource provisioning. We also propose an efficient backup routing algorithm for the hybrid approach. Our in-depth simulation results show that the proposed approach can achieve the ability of failure recovery comparable to the proactive scheme without the need for broadcasting the routing information.

The work reported in this paper was supported in part by the Office of Naval Research under Grant No. N00014-99-1-0465.