Scalable survivable ATM group communications

Group communications is important for command and control as well as tactical battlefield operations. Providing group communications over a network subject to failure and attack is a problem of growing interest. We examine techniques to provide survivability for ATM group communications and study the scalability of such approaches. A hop-limit constraint is a technique used to limit the number of routes considered such that routing problems of higher order complexity can be solved. While varying the hop-limit, we compare the feasibility and cost of providing survivability using working multipoint routes with disjoint dedicated backup multipoint routes, where the multipoint routes are setup using either self-healing survivable rings, shared muticast trees, or VC meshes. Based on our results, we conclude with a hop-limit heuristic that can be used in formulations to provide scalable survivable group communications.