Fault-tolerant multimesh networks

The ring multimesh design proposed previously by the authors (1992) is refined to make it tolerant of station failures. When stations lose power, various row and column rings are fused into a larger ring for the duration of the failure. The token-passing protocol is adapted to manage temporary path creation in the presence of these permanently fused rings. System capacity degrades gracefully as more stations fail, and full connectivity is maintained regardless of the number of failed stations