Self-healing ATM networks using multi-path concept

Self-healing is a process of reconfiguring a network itself when a link failure occurs. The main purposes of self-healing are to prevent calls in progress from bring cancelled and to make sure that the Quality of Service (QOS) for the calls in progress is not degraded. This paper proposes a self-healing network architecture using multi-path concept. Multi-path concept has been investigated in Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)-based Broadband-Integrated Services Digital Networks (BISDN) to prevent overload on single-path. In multi-path concept, multiple paths are set up between a source and a destination so that cells or groups of cells of a call may travel along different paths from the same source to the same destination. Multi-path concept can be applied to self-healing in such a way that if a path fails, cells of an on-going call will not be distributed to the failed path while the cells dropped on this failed path will be redistributed among the remaining multiple paths, thus providing self-healing mechanism and preventing QOS from being degraded.