Architecture for restorable call allocation and fast VP restoration in mesh ATM networks

This paper presents an architecture for restorable call allocation and fast virtual path (VP) restoration in mesh ATM networks. In this architecture, virtual working and spare capacities needed for call allocation and restoration are reserved and released dynamically on a call-by-call basis at the time of call admission and termination. This obviates the need for advance assignment of spare and working capacities. To shorten the call processing delay, this is done in a parallel-distributed fashion. To provide restorable call allocation, parallel-distributed call processing algorithms of sender-chooser type are suggested. The algorithms integrate, on the call level, virtual bandwidth allocation, virtual spare-capacity assignment, and fixed, alternate, or state-dependent routing. Each routing scheme leads to a particular tradeoff between call processing complexity, call setup delay, and bandwidth efficiency. For each pair of nodes, two sets of VPs are provisioned. The first, working VP (WVP) set, is used for call allocation during the normal operation. The second, spare VP (SVP) set, is used for WVP restoration in the event of failures of network elements. Each SVP protects a preassigned subset of the node pair's WVPs. Each SVP is selected to be link/node disjoint from the WVPs that it is assigned to protect. This assures a protection of the WVP set by a small number of SVPs. Since SVPs are preset and appropriate virtual spare capacities are reserved in advance, the architecture guarantees full restorability and provides very fast restoration. The restoration is done on the VP level in a self-healing manner. The suggested architecture requires only local information to be maintained at each node.