Fast Recovery Mechanism Research Articles

A New Link Adaptation Technique for Very High Frequency Data Exchange System in Future Maritime Communication

The growing demand for communication technology capable of providing high transmission rates in maritime environments has led to the exploration of the very high frequency (VHF) data exchange system (VDES) as a promising solution. The VDES, the integration of an automatic identification system (AIS), application-specific messaging (ASM), and VHF data exchange (VDE), offers improved transmission rates and stable connections compared with existing technologies. Although the VDES supports high transmission rates through various modulation and coding scheme (MCS) technologies, it lacks a standardized mechanism for controlling MCS parameters and relies on user algorithms for operation. In this paper, we introduce the maritime auto-rate fall-back (mARF) technology, designed to effectively address the challenges of maritime communication scenarios using the MCS framework provided by the VDES. mARF technology incorporates fast drop-out and recovery mechanisms to swiftly adapt to changing MCS types in the presence of deep nulls, a common occurrence in maritime communication environments. These adaptive thresholds for fast drop-out and recovery operations are dynamically learned using historical communication data. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of mARF in enhancing the MCS control capabilities of the VDES. Our results show a significant performance improvement of 18% compared to the existing model, validating the potential of mARF in optimizing maritime communication channels and supporting a high transmission rate.

Quantitative measurement of link failure reaction time for devices with P4-programmable data planes

Quick handling of link failures remains a challenging issue in current communication networks, although it is crucial to many routing algorithms. Link failures are the leading cause of packet losses and delays, therefore, failure recovery is tied to stringent requirements for certain services, such as the sub-50 millisecond completion time for carrier-grade networks, which is sometimes difficult to achieve in traditional routing schemes. For this reason, fast recovery strategies are key pillars of modern communication networks. In this paper, we demonstrate the benefits of the devices with Programmable Data Planes (PDP) for fast reacting to link failures. We first review the link failure detection, reaction and recovery procedures and then we discuss the main fast failure recovery mechanisms employed by different types of devices in current communication networks. In addition, we present a novel method to measure the link failure reaction time of an Intel Tofino switch with PDP, as well as the results obtained when measuring such time using real hardware equipment. Our results show that such hardware devices provide a failure reaction time in the order of microseconds, with an average of 472.88μ\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$\\upmu $$\\end{document}s, which poses PDP as a key technology to achieve zero packet loss and zero delay failure recovery.

Clustering based secure error report fault tolerant routing in mobile adhoc networks

A Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a self-constructed network consisting of spatially distributed nodes that cooperatively arrange themselves without any centralized manager or fixed based stations. In MANET, the nodes are deployed in a dynamic scenario, so, the nodes may fail as a result of energy depletion, hardware failure, communication link errors, and malicious attacks. Therefore, it is necessary to design energy-efficient fault-tolerant algorithms and protocols for MANETs. Since the development of Mobile Ad-hoc networks was originally motivated by military applications, such as battlefield surveillance and healthcare applications it is required to have a fast recovery mechanism to overcome the fault condition. In this research work, a fault-tolerant Routing mechanism is designed and implemented to address the fault conditions such as node failure, link failure, and critical battery issues called Fault tolerant cluster based AODV with Error Reporting Routing (CAODVERR) protocol, and to improve the stability of the MANET. Also, an Error reporting mechanism has been incorporated with the Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol.

P4-based design of fast failure recovery for software-defined networks

Communication networks require high availability to provide reliable services to users. One of techniques maintaining high availability of communication networks is fast failure recovery such as the multiple routing configurations (MRC) algorithm. In MRC, multiple virtual networks named backup routing configurations for transmitting data after a single link/node failure occurrence are constructed on the basis of a normal routing configuration on a physical network. When a failure occurs during data transmission on the physical network, MRC immediately switches the normal routing configuration to appropriate backup routing configurations to ensure data transmission without significant delay and packet loss . In this paper, we introduce a design of a fast failure recovery mechanism using MRC for software-defined networks with Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors (P4). P4 is a programming language that enables us to define the behavior of the data plane of network devices in software-defined networks. We provide the implementation of some functions for fast failure recovery, including failure detection and packet forwarding . We verify the behavior of our implementation through practical demonstrations using Mininet.

A Survey of Fast-Recovery Mechanisms in Packet-Switched Networks

In order to meet their stringent dependability requirements, most modern packet-switched communication networks support fast-recovery mechanisms in the data plane. While reactions to failures in the data plane can be significantly faster compared to control plane mechanisms, implementing fast recovery in the data plane is challenging, and has recently received much attention in the literature. This survey presents a systematic, tutorial-like overview of packet-based fast-recovery mechanisms in the data plane, focusing on concepts but structured around different networking technologies, from traditional link-layer and IP-based mechanisms, over BGP and MPLS to emerging software-defined networks and programmable data planes. We examine the evolution of fast-recovery standards and mechanisms over time, and identify and discuss the fundamental principles and algorithms underlying different mechanisms. We then present a taxonomy of the state of the art, summarize the main lessons learned, and propose a few concrete future directions.

TFR: A Novel Approach for Clock Synchronization Fault Recovery in Precision Time Protocol (PTP) Networks

Accurate and precise clock synchronization is one of the fundamental requirements for various applications, such as telecommunication systems, measurement and control systems, and smart grid systems. Precision time protocol (PTP) was designed and specified in IEEE 1588 to meet that requirement. PTP provides a mechanism for synchronizing the clocks in a PTP system to a high degree of accuracy and precision based on exchange synchronization messages through a master–slave hierarchy. The best master clock (BMC) algorithm is currently used to establish the master–slave hierarchy for PTP. However, the BMC algorithm does not provide a fast recovery mechanism in case of master failures. The accuracy and precision of the PTP clocks could be deteriorated by the occurrence of failure in the network (link or node failure). These fault occurrences will affect network performance and reliability, and cause clock time drifting of the PTP nodes. In this paper, we present a novel approach, called timing fault recovery (TFR), to significantly reduce clock time drifting in PTP systems. TFR detects the fault occurrence in the network and recovers it by using a handshake mechanism with a short duration. Therefore, the TFR approach provides clock stability and constancy and increases the reliability and the availability of PTP systems. The performance of TFR has been analyzed and compared to that of the standard PTP. Various simulations were conducted to validate the performance analysis. The results show that, for our sample network, the TFR approach reduces clock drifting by 90% in comparison to the standard PTP, thus providing better clock firmness and synchronization accuracy for PTP clocks.

A Novel Algorithm for Establishing a Balanced Synchronization Hierarchy with Spare Masters (BSHSM) for the IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol

The best master clock (BMC) algorithm is currently used to establish the master-slave hierarchy for the IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP). However, the BMC algorithm may create an unbalanced hierarchy that contains several boundary clocks with a large number of slaves in comparison to other clocks. The unbalanced hierarchy can cause problems, such as high communication load and high bandwidth consumption in boundary clocks. Additionally, the BMC algorithm does not provide any fast recovery mechanism in the case of a master failure. In this paper, we propose a novel balanced synchronization hierarchy with spare masters (BSHSM) algorithm to establish a balanced master-slave hierarchy and to provide a fast recovery mechanism in the case of master failures for the PTP. The BSHSM algorithm establishes the master-slave hierarchy with boundary clocks that have a balanced number of slaves. In doing so, it solves the problems caused by the unbalanced master-slave hierarchy. Additionally, the BSHSM algorithm provides a fast recovery mechanism by selecting a spare master for each boundary clock; this allows a boundary clock to immediately select a new master clock when its current master has failed or is disconnected. The fast recovery mechanism reduces the period of running freely and clock drift in clocks, improving the synchronization quality of the PTP. Various simulations were conducted using the network simulation OMNeT++ v4.6 to analyze, evaluate, and compare the performance of the BSHSM and BMC algorithms. The simulation results show that the synchronization hierarchy of the BSHSM algorithm is much more balanced than the BMC algorithm, and it also has a shorter period of recovery.

Recursive SDN for Carrier Networks

Control planes for global carrier networks should be programmable and scalable. Neither traditional control planes nor new SDN-based control planes meet both of these goals. Here we propose a framework for recursive routing computations that combines the best of SDN (programmability through centralized controllers) and traditional networks (scalability through hierarchy) to achieve these two desired properties. Through simulation on graphs of up to 10,000 nodes, we evaluate our design's ability to support a variety of unicast routing and traffic engineering solutions, while incorporating a fast failure recovery mechanism based on network virtualization.

Efficient routing for middlebox policy enforcement in software-defined networking

Network applications require traffic to sequence through multiple types of middleboxes to enhance network functions, e.g., providing security and guaranteeing performance. Sequenced-middlebox policy routing on top of regular layer 2/3 flow routing is challenging to be flexibly managed by network administrators. In addition, various types of middlebox resources concurrently obtained by numerous applications complicate network-resource management. Furthermore, middlebox failures can lead to a lack of security and the malfunction of entire network. In this paper, we formulate a mixed-integer linear programming problem to achieve a network load-balancing objective in the context of sequenced-middlebox policy routing. Our global routing approach manages network resources efficiently by simplifying candidate-path selections, balancing the entire network and using the simulated annealing algorithm. Moreover, in case of middlebox failures, we design a fast recovery mechanism by exploiting the remaining link and middlebox resources locally. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to handle failures in sequenced-middlebox scenarios using OpenFlow. Finally, we implement proposed routing approaches on Mininet testbed and evaluate experiments’ scalability, assessing the effectiveness of the approaches. Results of the optimization on a test topology include an increase up to 26.4% of the throughput with respect to a sequenced shortest-path routing.

Low-power neighbor discovery for mobility-aware wireless sensor networks

While more and more deployments of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are successful, very few are actually mobility-aware. Due to their intermittent connectivity, mobile nodes induce certain instabilities, and thus, require to transmit multiple data packets in a short period of time. The nature of mobile nodes can lead to a link quality deterioration or even more to link disconnection. This instability requires frequent link establishments between a mobile and a neighboring static node before initiating data packet transmissions. To do so, the need for an efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is extremely important and challenging. In this paper, we present MobiDisc, an advanced mobile-supporting scheme for low-power MAC protocols, which allows for efficient neighbor(hood) discovery and low-delay communication. Moreover, we propose a FAN (First Ack Next-hop) mode that accelerates transmissions. Both MobiDisc and MobiDisc-FAN come with a Fast Recovery Mechanism (FRM) that enables seamless handovers in the network. Our thorough performance evaluation, conducted on top of Contiki OS, shows that MobiDisc outperforms a number of state-of-the-art solutions (including MoX-MAC and ME-ContikiMAC), by terms of reducing both delay and energy consumption, while the reliability is kept over 98%.

CMT‐CQA: Cross‐layer QoS‐aware adaptive concurrent multipath data transfer in heterogeneous networks

Stream control transport protocol (SCTP)‐based concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) can help multi‐homed devices to increase their throughput by making use of parallel transmissions over multiple paths and bandwidth aggregation. However, if CMT cannot identify wireless error, it cannot really achieve the desired performance. Furthermore, if CMT only utilizes all available paths for data delivery, it will undoubtedly degrade application‐level performance since the asymmetric paths may involve large quality differences. This paper proposes a novel cross‐layer quality‐of‐service (QoS)‐aware adaptive CMT (CMT‐CQA) with the following aims: (i) to provide an adaptive ‘CMT‐to‐partial CMT’ adjustment strategy for efficient bandwidth aggregation by jointly considering transport layer QoS, MAC layer QoS, and path history information; (ii) to address an enhanced congestion window (cwnd) fast recovery mechanism to reduce bursty transmission in multi‐homed wireless network environments where fail‐over occurs frequently; and (iii) to introduce a proper multimedia transmission behavior to improve users' quality of experience (QoE) for multimedia streaming service. Simulation results show that CMT‐CQA outperforms the existing CMT solutions in terms of performance and QoS. © 2014 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Fast Recovery From Link Failures in Ethernet Networks

Fast-recovery from link failures is a well-studied topic in IP networks. Employing fast-recovery in Ethernet networks is complicated as the forwarding is based on destination MAC addresses, which do not have the hierarchical nature similar to those exhibited in Layer 3 in the form of IP-prefixes. Moreover, switches employ backward learning to populate the forwarding table entries. Thus, any fast recovery mechanism in Ethernet networks must be based on undirected spanning trees if backward learning is to be retained. In this paper, we develop three alternatives for achieving fast recovery from single link failures in Ethernet networks. All three approaches provide guaranteed recovery from single link failures. The approaches differ in the technologies required for achieving fast recovery, namely VLAN rewrite or mac-in-mac encapsulation or both. We study the performance of the approaches developed on five different networks.

Improving Westwood over Bandwidth Instability

The design of TCP/IP is the key of the success of Internet. Due to the network considered as a “black box”, the congestion control algorithm becomes the most important part of TCP. TCP Westwood provides an eligible rate estimation algorithm that improves upon the performance of TCP Reno in wired as well as wireless networks. The improvement is most significant in wireless networks with lossy links. In mobile communication, due to the node mobility, the bandwidth shifting requires higher demands to QoS. In mobile networks with high bandwidth, such as 3G/LTE, the bandwidth will shift rapidly in different positions. We call this bandwidth instability, which is the cause of the degradation of performance. However, Westwood TCP or the other popular TCP cannot response quickly to this situation. In this paper, we verify the problem mentioned above of varied TCP protocols. After that, we propose an improved fast recovery mechanism based on Westwood TCP. The new mechanism can adjust the congestion window in time when the bandwidth shifts.

Practical Swarm Optimization based Fault-Tolerance Algorithm for the Internet of Things

The fault-tolerance routing problem is one of the most important issues in the application of the Internet of Things, and has been attracting growing research interests. In order to maintain the communication paths from source sensors to the macronodes, we present a hybrid routing scheme and model, in which alternate paths are created once the previous routing is broken. Then, we propose an improved efficient and intelligent fault-tolerance algorithm (IEIFTA) to provide the fast routing recovery and reconstruct the network topology for path failure in the Internet of Things. In the IEIFTA, mutation direction of the particle is determined by multi-swarm evolution equation, and its diversity is improved by the immune mechanism, which can improve the ability of global search and improve the converging rate of the algorithm. The simulation results indicate that the IEIFTA-based fault-tolerance algorithm outperforms the EARQ algorithm and the SPSOA algorithm due to its ability of fast routing recovery mechanism and prolonging the lifetime of the Internet of Things.

Practical Swarm Optimization based Fault-Tolerance Algorithm for the Internet of Things

The fault-tolerance routing problem is one of the most important issues in the application of the Internet of Things, and has been attracting growing research interests. In order to maintain the communication paths from source sensors to the macronodes, we present a hybrid routing scheme and model, in which alternate paths are created once the previous routing is broken. Then, we propose an improved efficient and intelligent fault-tolerance algorithm (IEIFTA) to provide the fast routing recovery and reconstruct the network topology for path failure in the Internet of Things. In the IEIFTA, mutation direction of the particle is determined by multi-swarm evolution equation, and its diversity is improved by the immune mechanism, which can improve the ability of global search and improve the converging rate of the algorithm. The simulation results indicate that the IEIFTA-based fault-tolerance algorithm outperforms the EARQ algorithm and the SPSOA algorithm due to its ability of fast routing recovery mechanism and prolonging the lifetime of the Internet of Things.

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT OF BOTTLENECK LINK IN RED VEGAS OVER HETEROGENEOUS NETWORKS

In communication networks, congestion avoidance in routers is one of the hottest topics. Current IP network has become the dominant paradigm for all networking environments. The significant cause of packet losses in such heterogeneous networks is no longer limited to network congestion. Traditional TCP interprets every packet loss as caused by congestion which may be not the case in the current Internet. TCP Vegas detects network congestion in the early stage and successfully prevents periodic packet loss that usually occurs in TCP Reno. In this paper a new variant of TCP Vegas namedRed Vegas has used. The Red Vegas may detect random packet losses precisely. Through the packet loss differentiation, Red Vegas reacts appropriately to the losses, and therefore the throughput of connection over heterogeneous networks significantly improved. The bandwidth of the bottleneck link is under-utilized when the random loss rate is high. Therefore, a new design of the fast recovery mechanism for Red Vegas would be carried out. The proposed mechanism improves the aggression of Vegas TCP in competing for the available bandwidth whilst maintaining the inherent stability of the original Vegas TCP scheme.

A Fast IMS Service Recovery Mechanism for the Handover Over MIH-Capable Heterogeneous Networks

IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) is the core multimedia network in the next generation all-IP environment. It provides access independence for multimedia applications across fixed and mobile access networks. When a roaming IMS subscriber connects to IMS through mobile access networks, handover becomes a critical issue; this needs to be addressed. Since IMS concerns application layer handover for session mobility, the application layer handover takes a long time for recovering the suspended sessions according to the standard IMS session reestablishment procedure. This introduces noticeable service interruption to end users and cannot be tolerated for real-time applications. In this paper we propose a fast IMS service recovery mechanism to shorten the service recovery latency by combining the IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover service and the IRTF Media-Independent Pre-Authentication frameworks. The proposed mechanism performs the necessary IMS registration and QoS re-negotiation procedures in advance of lower-layer handover. Thus it reduces the service recovery latency for suspended services. With parallel design in time, the proposed mechanism is able to shorten overall handover relevant latency as well. Technical examination shows that it is easy to deploy the proposed mechanism in current multimedia service environments.

An Immune Cooperative Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for Fault‐Tolerant Routing Optimization in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

The fault‐tolerant routing problem is important consideration in the design of heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (H‐WSNs) applications, and has recently been attracting growing research interests. In order to maintain k disjoint communication paths from source sensors to the macronodes, we present a hybrid routing scheme and model, in which multiple paths are calculated and maintained in advance, and alternate paths are created once the previous routing is broken. Then, we propose an immune cooperative particle swarm optimization algorithm (ICPSOA) in the model to provide the fast routing recovery and reconstruct the network topology for path failure in H‐WSNs. In the ICPSOA, mutation direction of the particle is determined by multi‐swarm evolution equation, and its diversity is improved by immune mechanism, which can enhance the capacity of global search and improve the converging rate of the algorithm. Then we validate this theoretical model with simulation results. The results indicate that the ICPSOA‐based fault‐tolerant routing protocol outperforms several other protocols due to its capability of fast routing recovery mechanism, reliable communications, and prolonging the lifetime of WSNs.

Constructing disjoint paths for failure recovery and multipath routing

Applications such as Voice over IP and video streaming require continuous network service, requiring fast failure recovery mechanisms. Proactive failure recovery schemes have been recently proposed to improve network performance during the failure transients. These proactive failure recovery schemes need extra infrastructural support in the form of routing table entries, extra addresses etc. In this paper, we study if the extra infrastructure support can be exploited to build disjoint paths in those frameworks, while keeping the lengths of the recovery paths close to those of the primary paths. Our evaluations show that it is possible to extend the proactive failure recovery schemes to provide support for nearly-disjoint paths which can be employed in multipath routing for load balancing and QoS.

Effect of complex recovery of saturable absorption on the performance of mode-locked lasers

Saturable absorbers with balanced slow and fast recovery mechanisms exhibiting a broadband recovery dynamics are shown to be advantageous for both reliable start-up of passive mode-locking and efficient pulse shortening.