Resilient communication through multihoming for remote healthcare applications

Advancements in today´s technologies make it possible to offer competitive home-based healthcare services using software routers based on open source software combined with Commodity-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware. In this paper, we propose resilient communication through multihoming for remote healthcare applications. The solution is based on Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) for fast failure detection and a customized rerouting operation. We investigate the tradeoff between short reaction times for rerouting and low probability of false alarms. This is challenging to achieve under high traffic loads since the load affects the BFD session which is formed to monitor the bidirectional forwarding capabilities. We propose a simple mechanism that provides fast failover and meanwhile maintains a very low probability of generating false alarms and unwanted rerouting decisions. The mechanism is based on allocation of system resources for processing BFD control messages, and we demonstrate through empirical results that BFD then can be used in software routers to provide average failover times within 200 ms.