An analysis of the congestion effects of link failures in wide area networks

The authors present the results of a study to determine the effects of link failures on the performance of a network in terms of the occurrence of congestion due to traffic restoration after a failure. The network studied is a virtual circuit based packet switched wide area network. A generic queueing framework is developed to study the effect of failures and the subsequent traffic restoration on network performance. In general, the congestion resulting after a failure is a transient phenomenon. Hence, a numerical methods based nonstationary queueing analysis is conducted in order to quantify the effects of failures in terms of the transient behavior of queue lengths and packet loss probabilities. A bounding relationship is developed whereby a network node can determine whether or not congestion will occur as the result of traffic restoration after a failure.<
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