An Analysis of the Timing of Traffic Restoration in Wide Area Communication Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we study the timing of virtual circuit traffic restoration after a link failure in wide area communication networks. The commonly used scheme of almost simultaneously rerouting the virtual circuits is compared with a scheme wherein the rerouting of the virtual circuits is staggered, thus ensuring that they do not congest the network node at the same time. We determine which approach is better by minimizing the time taken by a network node to reach steady state after the traffic restoration.