Experimental demonstration of the HORNET survivable bi-directional ring architecture

In this work we demonstrate the HORNET 2FBPSR survivable architecture and the associated protocols. With simple intuition, we can see that this architecture performs up to twice as well as that of conventional ring architectures under normal conditions, and in the worst case the performance is equal after a cut occurs. We experimentally demonstrate that when a cut occurs, the maximum amount of time that any two nodes lose the ability to communicate is equal to the propagation delay of the fiber between them (less than 1 ms for a typical metro ring architecture). The demonstration of the HORNET testbed presented here is a major step towards making next generation high capacity packet-based MANs a reality.