Performance Evaluation of Self-healing Functionality in Atm-networks: Reform Perspective Performance Evaluation of Self-healing Funtionality in Atm Networks: the Reform Perspective

In modern networks, advanced and novel concepts are being deployed for the provision of protected services to the end user. Amongst these, the self-healing concept refers to the capability of the network to restore services in a distributed way without any immediate operator intervention, this in order to assure delivery of constant quality services under fault conditions. In this paper, the Self-Healing method of the ACTS 208 REFORM system is presented along with its architecture and important implementation details. A comprehensive evaluation of the Self-Healing protocol is performed, based on measurements resulting from field experiments at the REFORM testbed. The paper comments on the overall performance of such a survivable network by presenting the integration of the self-healer with the other components required to provide restorable services. Various tradeoffs are presented for the parameters of the Self-Healing protocol both at the connection end and connecting points of a VPC. The measurements have been taken considering various testbed configuration scenarios. For these experiments, multimedia applications, a call generator for load tests along with a message tracer for gathering and analysis of the results have been used.