Generalized Survivability Models for Many-to-Many Communication

Network resources are imperfect and vulnerable to failure from a wide variety of sources. Current survivability models guarantee protection against these failures, but at the cost of inflexibility in terms of applicability to different routing standards and in how many additional resources are consumed to provide protection against those failures. We propose several generalized models that utilize the flexibility of many-to-many communication which, when implemented, can solve a large number of existing survivability and routing problems. A key component of these models is a flexible source and destination set with which communication between any number of endpoints can be established. These connections can be adjusted through changes to a flexible failure set to have either end-to-end or partial protection against the failures of both nodes and links. With these models, a framework can be built to tackle the complex survivability problems of an evolving Internet.