Design and operation of highly reliable telecommunication networks

单个电信网络组件（例如交换节点，或甚至更可能是光纤电缆）的物理故障可能是灾难性的，影响大量业务操作，甚至紧急系统（911）。即使在正常时期，这种故障在大型网络中也非常频繁，最近对恐怖主义和蓄意攻击或破坏的关注只会提高确保网络可靠性和可用性的方法的重要性。目前在网络生存性问题上所做的许多工作通常假设，尽管故障不一定可以预测，但潜在的故障场景是已知的，并且可以提前指定（例如，单个光纤电缆，或者在某些情况下，一次不超过两个或三个的组合）。然而，确定网络如何可以优化设计，然后动态重新配置的任意广泛和灾难性的故障，以最大限度地提高生存能力，特别是关键服务的情况下，仍然是一个悬而未决的问题，是我提出的研究课题。这项研究将扩展目前的生存性原则，允许在可能的情况下进行灾难恢复，并开发新的方法来处理传统协议无法适应的灾难恢复方面。更重要的是，我们将寻求开发和展示一套生存机制，能够从任意广泛的网络故障中恢复，并可以提供协调的网络范围内的重新配置响应，以最大限度地提高关键服务的生存能力，以最小的额外资本投资。分布式自组织路径恢复特别适合于这里所需的全局重新配置类型，并且几种新兴的网络生存性方法（节点包含跨度恢复，故障独立路径保护P-循环，节点环绕P-循环）也在这方面显示出希望。这项研究的重点将涉及修改现有的协议和开发新的协议，以允许对灾难性故障进行协调的全网络响应，特别是使关键或紧急通信最大限度地可扩展。

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.