Fast low-cost failure recovery for reliable real-time multimedia communication

Transmission of multimedia data over a packet-switched network typically requires resource reservation to guarantee an acceptable level of performance (e.g., throughput or delay). In this article we address the problem of how to make such real-time communication reliable. First of all, it is essential to bound the duration of service disruption caused by failures to a reasonably small value. Considering the large volume of multimedia data, minimizing the fault-tolerance overhead is also important. Furthermore, as more applications with different dependability requirements share the same network, the level of dependability for a given application should be "customizable," depending on the criticality of the application. We first survey the existing approaches, and then present our scheme which is developed in accordance with three design goals: fast failure recovery, low fault-tolerance overhead, and per-connection reliability guarantee. Our scheme provides an integrated solution covering such issues as connection establishment, failure detection, runtime failure recovery, and resource reconfiguration.