Analysis and design of a highly reliable transport architecture for ISDN frame-relay networks

The authors explore control strategies in the design of a high-performance transport architecture for integrated services digital network (ISDN) frame-relay networks. For real-time congestion control, buffer management, priority queueing, adaptive windowing, and selective frame, discard policies are described that can effectively maximize network efficiency while preventing unfair usage of shared network resources. Virtual-circuit routing strategies are proposed that ensure an efficient distribution of traffic loads across the network despite variations in traffic patterns and topology changes. It is shown that source routing provides significant performance benefits over link-by-link routing, particularly in large networks that are not so densely connected. Routing table update and call acceptance mechanisms are described that provide for efficient bandwidth management in the network. Fault-tolerant strategies are described that include fast failure detection and local reroute. These strategies are capable of restoring affected virtual circuits in less than 10 s, which is adequate for session maintenance under most application scenarios. >