Survivable planar internetwork (SPIN) for multimedia communications

A survivable planar internetwork (SPIN) architecture to interconnect local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), and extended-area satellite networks (ESANs) by organizing them into various connectivity planes that extend tie range of survivable communications provided by each is proposed. The core of the SPIN architecture is a layer of gateways that interconnect purpose-specific networks or preexisting networks deployed for localized networking support to provide a much wider range of communications. An adaptive SPIN access protocol (ASAP) is proposed to handle both data and stream traffic in the proposed SPIN. According to ASAP, the reservation requests are handled by the terrestrial network and the data transmission will take place via satellite network or the ground segment, depending on the resources available. Other issues, such as routing and congestion control, are discussed