Bandwidth-adaptive VP protection using user cells

Broadband integrated services digital networks (B-ISDN), which utilize asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) technology, promise to provide a common platform for greatly increased service capacity. In terms of virtual path (VP) protection switching time, a high-bandwidth VP should be switched faster than a low-bandwidth VP in order to keep the number of damaged cells proportional to the total number of cells in that VP. This paper proposes a notification method using user cells. The proposed method can notify without interrupting the existing user cells. The total switching times were measured experimentally as 1 msec for 1.5 Mbps and 100 /spl mu/sec for 15 Mbps. These results demonstrate that the bandwidth adaptive method is very fast compared to VP AIS methods, and even STM methods which require 50 msec.