Efficient spare-resource allocation for fast restoration of real-time channels from network component failures

Since real-time applications usually require not only timeliness but also fault-tolerance, it is essential to incorporate fault-tolerance into real-time communication services that are indispensable to distributed real-time applications. The techniques for failure recovery in datagram communication are not adequate for real-time communication, because they cannot provide recovery-delay guarantees. To ensure fast recovery of a real-time channel from network component failures, we need to reserve network resources (called 'spare resources') along a backup route before failures actually occur. The focus of this paper is on minimizing the amount of spare resources while meeting the fault-tolerance requirement. Specifically, we present resource sharing mechanisms and backup-route selection algorithms, and evaluate their efficiency with extensive simulations.