Implementation of Fast Restoration Mechanisms in ATM Networks

Automatic and rapid network service restoration (self-healing) when failures occur is of increasing importance for network operations and management as network speed and bandwidth increase. In this paper, I presented the implementation of self healing functions of the REFORM system. The REFORM system is to ensure network performance and availability within acceptable levels under normal and fault conditions. The specifications of this system covers both the functional and architectural aspects. The REFORM system provides self-healing mechanisms at both the control and management planes. Self-healing implies resource restoration by means of a distributed mechanism. The term selfhealing refers to the ability of the network to reconFig. itself around failures quickly and gracefully with the goal of restoring service availability within acceptable levels for existing as well as future connections. The implementation approach was presented based on real experiments performed in the REFORM/EXPERT testbed in Basle, Swiss.