Failure recovery for multi-party real-time communication

For real-time communication services to achieve widespread usage, it is important that the network services behave gracefully when any component fails. In this paper, we describe techniques and mechanisms for maintaining network services for multi-party real-time communication in the face of failures that may make parts of the network inaccessible. These protocols provide high performance during normal operations and the network performance degrades gracefully in face of network failures; e.g. in the presence of failures, the routes selected may not be optimal, the connection set-up may take a little more time, or resource allocation may be less efficient. With these mechanisms, the real-time communication protocols achieve robustness to single and/or multiple failures in the network, without diluting the strength of the performance guarantees offered or sacrificing the system performance in the common case