Link failure detection for maintaining session continuity in packet data networks

Abstract A link failure in the path of a virtual circuit in a packet data network will lead to premature disconnection of the circuit by the end‐points. A soft failure will result in degraded throughout over the virtual circuit. If these failures can be detected quickly and reliably, then appropriate rerouteing strategies can automatically reroute the virtual circuits that use the failed facility. In this paper, we develop a methodology for analysing and designing failure detection schemes for digital facilites. Based on errored second data, we develop a Markov model for the error and failure behaviour of a T1 T1 carrier, the lowest level in the plesiochronous digital carrier hierarchy in the United States. AT1 carrier has a payload of 24 64Kbps PCM channels. trunk. The performance of a detection scheme is characterized by its false alarm probability and the detection delay. Using the Markov model, we analyse the performance of detection schemes that use physical layer or link layer information. The schemes basically rely upon detecting the occurrence of severely errored seconds (SESs). A failure is declared when a counter, that is driven by the occurrence of SESs, reaches a certain threshold. For hard failures, the design problem reduces to a proper choice of the threshold at which failure is declared, and on the connection. reattempt parameters of the virtual circuit end‐point session recovery procedures. For soft failures, the performance of a detection scheme depends, in addition, on how long and how frequent the error bursts are in a given failure mode. We also propose and analyse a novel Level 2 detection scheme that relies only upon anomalies observable at Level 2, i.e. CRC failures and idle‐fill flag errors. Our results suggest that Level 2 schemes that perform as well as Level 1 schemes are possible.