RREACT: A Distributed Network Restoration Protocol for Rapid Restoration of Active Communication Trunks

Abstract

Commercial telecommunications networks have tight real-time requirements for restoration after a failure. The problem of finding the available restoration paths and reassigning the interrupted traffic within such tight real-time requirements places difficult demands on the restoration protocol employed. This paper reviews several distributed network restoration protocols and presents a new distributed protocol called RREACT, for performing this function with a distributed algorithm which uses no prior network status or topography knowledge and which supports multiple simultaneous link restorations. Simulation results show that this protocol significantly outperforms other existing algorithms based on the Sender-Chooser approach, usually completing the total restoration in well under one second. In addition, enhancements to the basic algorithm are described which help to ensure near-optimal use of network spare channel resources and address such restoration situations where a complete r...