Control protocol and its performance analysis for distributed ATM virtual path self-healing network

A restorable network comprised of a mesh of ATM virtual paths (AVPs) is expected to be superior to distributed SONET digital cross-connect self-healing networks in terms of restoration time. The paper presents a reliable protocol and evaluation of its performance for control information transfer in distributed AVP self-healing networks. Two error-recovery technologies for the data-link level (selective retransmission and go-back-N) in AVP networks are reviewed, and a model for evaluating the delay of the go-back-N method that has been used in existing terrestrial systems is derived analytically. The proposed analytic model is combined with a self-healing simulator for AVP mesh networks to evaluate the restoration time characteristics. Case study results for the worst-case scenario show that the total restoration time, including link-by-link error control for self-healing control messages, is expected to be less than 2 s, which is the time objective for complete restoration for a metropolitan LATA network. The results also show that the estimated average delay penalty for adding the link-by-link error recovery process is 7.5 ms for complete service restoration