Network Design and Traffic Recovery Procedures
for Survivable Wide Area Packet Networks
(funded by National Science Foundation, August 1995 - December 1998)
Principal Investigators
Project Description
Due to the rapidly growing demand for information transfer, such as voice, data,
and video across communication networks, the need for reliable communication
service has become increasingly important. The potentially drastic effectsof
communication network failures have been demonstrated by several highly
publicized network failures, showing the need for survivable networks that provide
service that is robust to failures. This project addresses the need for reliable
communication service on wide area packet switched networks subject to link and
node failures.
The objective of the research project is to formulate, develop and prototype generic
algorithms which can be applied to improve packet switched network survivability.
The project will focus on two aspects of network survivability:
- network topological design models and algorithms will be developed to provide
for a specific quality of service under failure conditions
- network management algorithms, specific to traffic recovery after a failure will
be developed in order to make optimum use of network resources after a failure
Since fault recovery is possible at various layers,
one aspect of this work is determining what combinations of traffic restoration
mechanisms should be used at each layer and how this is related to the network
topological design. The research will be conducted using techniques from optimization
theory, simulation, queueing theory, and control theory. Throughout the research
there will be a particular emphasis on the transient congestion that results
after a network failure and incorporating its effects into the network design and traffic
recovery procedures.
The significance of this research will be its fundamental contributions to the base of
knowledge in network survivability techniques. It is expected that the outcome of this
work will considerably benefit the future design and deployment of survivable private,
public and defense communication networks. Specifically, the algorithms developed
will be suitable for software implementation in network design tools, network management
packages and as add-on software to network nodes.
Another page for
this project is maintained by the University of Pittsburgh.
For a related project funded by DARPA.
To contact us about this work, please send
e-mail.
Update:
Relevant publications, technical reports so far based on this grant are listed
below:
- S. A. Shah and D. Medhi,
``Performance under a Failure of Wide-Area Datagram Networks
with Unicast and Multicast Traffic Routing,"
Proc. of IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM'98),
Bradford, Mass, October 1998.
- W.-P. Wang, D. Tipper, B. Jaeger and D. Medhi,
``Fault Recovery Routing in Wide Area Packet Networks,"
Proceedings of 15th International Teletraffic
Congress, Washington, DC, June 1997.
- R. Cotter, D. Medhi and D. Tipper,
``Traffic Backlog and
Impact on Network Dimensioning for Survivability
for Wide-Area VP-based ATM Networks,"
Proceedings of 15th International Teletraffic
Congress, Washington, DC, June 1997.
- D. Medhi and D. Tipper, "Towards Fault Recovery and Management in Communication
Networks (Guest Editorial)," Journal of Network and Systems
Management, Vol. 5, No. 2, June 1997. (to appear)
- D. Medhi and C.-T. Lu,
``Dimensioning and Computational Results for
Wide-Area Broadband Networks
with Two-level Dynamic Routing,"
IEICE Trans. on Communications,
Vol. E80-B, No. 2, pp. 273-281, 1997.
-
D. Medhi and I. Sukiman, ``Admission Control and Dynamic Routing Schemes
for Wide-Area Broadband Networks:
Their Interaction and Network Performance,"
Proceedings of IFIP-IEEE Conference on
Broadband Communications, Montreal, Canada, pp. 99-110,
April 1996.
Currently, pursuing research on the impact of a network failure on connection-less networks (such as Internet), as well as in the presence of
multi-casting routing and services.