Backup path sharing for survivable ATM networks

Survivability is one of the critical issues in ATM networks, since even a single link failure may cause a large amount of data loss, Therefore, it is highly needed to provide mechanisms to restore lost connections. One such mechanism proposed is backup recovery. This mechanism shows simple and fast restoration of a connection failure, however; it requires a lot of spare resources to maintain backup VPs. Until now, the efforts to improve spare resource efficiency of backup recovery mechanisms are concentrated to spare bandwidth allocation and sharing. In this paper, we propose a new restoration mechanism that provides backup route sharing as well as spare bandwidth sharing. The proposed mechanism provides improved spare resource efficiency and flexible backup path muting. We show the effectiveness of the mechanism by a simple simulation study.