Connection Establishment in High-speed Networks

Protocols for establishing, maintaining, and terminating connections in packet-switched networks have been studied in the literature and numerous standards have been developed to address this problem. In this paper, we reexamine connection establishment in the context of a high-speed packet network, introduce a protocol for connection establishment/takedown that is appropriate for such a network, and explain its advantages over previously proposed protocols. The main features of the proposed protocol are: Fast bandwidth reservation in order to avoid as much as possible reservation conflicts, guaranteed release of the reserved bandwidth even under nodal and link failures, soft recovery from processor failures which allows the maintenance of existing connections under processor failure provided the switch and links do not fail. The underlying model that we use is the recently developed PARIS/plaNET network, but the protocol can be adapted to other fast packet networking architectures.