Design and operation of highly reliable telecommunication networks

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Physical failure of a single telecommunication network component such as a switching node, or even more likely of a fibre cable, can be disastrous, affecting a vast array of business operations and even emergency systems (911). Such failures are surprisingly frequent in large networks even in normal times, and recent concerns about terrorism and deliberate attack or sabotage only heighten the importance of methods to ensure network reliability and availability. Much of the current work done on the network survivability problem generally assumes that, although failures can not necessarily be predicted, potential failure scenarios are known and specifiable in advance (say, individual fibre cables, or in some cases, combinations of no more than two or three at a time). However, determining how the network can be optimally designed and then dynamically reconfigured in the event of arbitrarily widespread and catastrophic failure to maximize survivability, particular of critical services, is still very much an open issue, and is the topic of my proposed research. This research will extend current survivability principles to allow for disaster recovery where possible, and develop new methods to deal with aspects of disaster recover that cannot be accommodated with conventional protocols. More to the point, we will seek to develop and demonstrate a suite of survivability mechanisms that are able to recover from arbitrarily widespread network failures and can provide a coordinated network-wide reconfiguration response to maximize survivability of critical services, with minimal additional capital investment. Distributed self-organizing path restoration is particularly well suited to the type of global reconfiguration needed here, and several emerging network survivability approaches (node-inclusive span restoration, failure-independent path-protecting p-cycles, node-encircling p-cycles) also show promise in this regard. The focus of this research will involve the modification of those existing protocols and development of new ones to allow for a coordinated network-wide response to a catastrophic failure, particular so that critical or emergency communication are maximally restorable.