INTRODUCTION

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 little
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 and integrated solution covering such
issues as connection establishment, failure detecting, runtime failure
recovery, and resource reconfiguration.
REAL – TIME COMMUNICATIONS
Real time transport of continuous media (video and audio) is
achieved through circuit switching in telephone services or by
broadcasting over shared media in television services. The end-to-end
performance is necessary to achieve required functionally of these
application (in real time applications) is often called end-to-end
quality of services (QOS). Today’s representative computer network,
Internet also lacks QOS support for continuous media applications.

However, many protocols such as RTP [1] XTP [1] and IP

multicast which are deployed on Internet to achieve QOS. But these
protocols do not meet the true multimedia requirements because they
only support a best effort service model. As the demand for real-time
communication services in recent years, numerous QOS models were
developed ranging from constant bit rate (CBR) services, which
resembles telephony service to the “controlled-load” service which
mimics the best-effort service in unloaded network. As QOS is our
main concern n real-time communications, they rely on some form of
resource reservation and admission controls. They share three
common properties.

QOS contracted
Connection-oriented
Reservation-based
A contract between a client and the network is established
before the client’s messages are actually transferred. The client must
first specify his input traffic behaviors and required QOS. The
network then computes the resource needs (e.g. link and cpu
bandwidth, buffer space) from this information, selects a path, and
reserves necessary resource along the path. If there are not enough
resources to meet the client’s QOS requirements., the request is
rejected. The client’s data messages are transported only via the
selected path with the resources reserved, and this virtual circuit is
often called a “Real-Time Channel”.

NETWORK DEPENDABILITY

Some application requires both dependable and timely

communication services. Example for such real-time multimedia
communications include remote medical service, Collaborative
scientific research, business net meeting, battle field command/control
etc. in some applications network availability, ie. Probability of
connection being available at any given time is they dependability
QOS measure.

Network failures can cause even larger-scale social disasters.

Example, a fire at an unmanned tall office building Illinois caused 3.5
million telephone calls to be blocked in 1988. in 1990’s several
similar accidents have been reported for various reasons, such as
damage of fiber cable caused by construction , earthquake, network
overhead etc. thus even though failures occur rarely, the consequences
of mishandling failures could be devasting, thus making network
reliability concern.

The current Internet with data gram services has successfully

dealt with two types of network failures: Transient and persistent. An
example of transient failure is temporary losses due to network
congestion or data corruption. There persistent failure includes the
breakdown of network components. Transient failures and dealt by
TCP which can handle transient loss of packets by acknowledgement
and retransmission. On the other hand persistent failures are dealt by
IP protocol along faulty networks by routing the packet. But
retransmission is unlikely in real-time systems because there is
usually not enough time o deletes and retransmits the lost real-time
message before its dead line expires. And also as reserving resources
on a fixed path and transporting real-time messages via that path
realize QOS guarantee, unlike data gram messages it cannot be
derouted.

Hence the persistent failure also causes serious failure. The

prevalence of optical fibers affects network dependability. The
probability of transmission errors in optical links becomes negligible.
Hence the chance of packet loss due to transmission errors is very
rare. Hence for real-time systems transient failures are relatively less
important because cohesion-induced packet losses can be avoided by
resource reservation. But in persistent failures a single failure or link
lads to the loss of large number of connection. Not only link failure
but also node failures are to be carefully dealt with. Moreover
computer networks are more vulnerable to viruses or hacking. So,
development of effective mechanism is must to cope up with network
failure is a must.
DESIRABLE FEATURES

To design fault-tolerant service, one must define the modal of

failure to be tolerated. Some applications can tolerate slow failure
recovery but require reliable delivery of messages even if it takes long
time such as e-mail and file transfer. Some applications require fast
failure recovery but loss can be tolerated. Real-time multimedia
applications fall to this category, as loss of couple of frames in
video/voice data streams may be acceptable. Let us assume transient
packet losses are acceptable to applications and are dealt by FEC
(forward error checking), and focus effectively on how to handle
persistent failures. We shall discuss about “channel failure”.

A real-time channel is said to have failed if the rate of correct

(content and timing) message delivery within a certain time interval is
below threshold specified by the application. There are 5 criteria that
characterize a good solution.

1.pre-connection dependability guarantee: The network

should provide guarantee on dependability for each connection,
so that successful recovery is guaranteed as long as failure
occurrences do not exceeded the fault tolerance capability of
the connection.
2. Fast-failure recovery: The service disruption time of a
connection caused by failures should be bounded to reasonable
small value.
3. Small fault-tolerance overhead: The additional resources
overhead for fault-tolerance should be acceptably low.
4. Robust failure handle: Failures should be handled robustly
even though failure occurrences may exceeder assumed failure
hypothesis.
 5. Interoperability/scalability: The failure recovery scheme
must be interoperable with various existing and future real-time
channel protocols.

EXISTING APPROACHES

The work has done on real-time communications and

approaches have been developed. Some of them are:

5.1 Reactive method: Simplest way of recovering real-time

channel failure is to be establishing a new real-time channel, which
includes failure components. This scheme relies on the broadcast of
all component failures to the entire network so that all hosts can
maintain a consistent view of the current topology.

Advantage: No fault-tolerance overhead in the absence of

failure recovery.

Disadvantage: The channel re-establishment attempt can

fail due to resource shortage at a particular time.

5.2 Failure masking: Here multiple copies of message are

sent simultaneously over disjoint paths.

Advantage: The method attempts to achieve both timely

and reliable delivery of message at the same time. Both
persistent and transient failures can be handled.

Disadvantage: It is very expensive due to multiple copies

of same message. Instead of transmitting entire message,
each message is broken into equal size sub-message, which
is then transmitted over different paths for FEC.
5.3 Single-Failure Immune (SFI): In this approach, cold-
standby resources are reserved for fault tolerance.

Advantage:
1. Guarantees failure recovery. In this additional
resources are reserved in vicinity of each real-time
channel at the time of channel establishment.
2. The advantage of this cold standby approach is that
although additional resources need to be reserved, the
resources reserved for fault tolerance can be utilized by
best effort in the absence of failure.

Extra Resources

Source Node Real-time channel Destination Node

FI CHANNEL
TELEPHONE NETWORKS
In old telephone network, a true electric circuit through
electro-mechanical or pure electrical exchanges connected two
phones. Now, telephone networks are very close to computer
network. A modern switching node in telephone networks is
almost a general-purpose computer equipped with high fault-
tolerance capability and powerful I/O capability. Techniques
for telephone service resemble those for real-time
communication services in packet switched network in both
services rely on similar principles such as dedicated resources
and static routing. Whenever a telephone connection is broken
down it is detoured. Failure recovery should be fast so that
users hardly notice disruption caused by the failure. The
successful fault recovery is also important. if no enough
resources are available for re-routing al affected connections,
some of them be dropped . To avoid resource shortage by
rerouting spare resources are reserved in advance. For rerouting
there are 2 strategies.

6.1 Span Restoration (Local Rerouting): This is used in

synchronous transfer mode networks. Here a “maximal flow”
model is used to find the optimal placement of spare resources
under deterministic failure hypothesis, typically a single link
failure. A drawback of the local rerouting is the resource usage
becomes inefficient after failure recovery because channel paths
tend to be lengthened by local detouring.

6.2 Path Resolution (End-to-End Rerouting): There are

two variations in this strategy depending o whether the failure
recovery paths are pre computed before failure occurrence or
determining after failures actually occur. In the former
approach, the pre-routed recovery path should be disjoint with
the original connection path, while the later the recovery paths
can use the healthy components of their original connection
 paths. The former has an advantage over the secondary in terms
of dependability guarantee.

COMPARISION OF EXISTING
APPROACHES
The latest approach uses end-to-end re-routing with pre-
computed recovery paths. We set up one or more backup
channels in advance in addition to each primary channel. Upon
failure of primary channel, one of its backups is prompted to a
new primary channel. There two main differences between path
restoration and latest approach.

Recovery Recovery Recovery Recovery

Method Overhead delay guidance
Reactive No Long No
SFI High Shorter Deterministic
Multicopy VeryHigh No Flexible
Span Low Shorter Deterministic
restoration
Path Lower Short Deterministic
restoration
Our Lower Short Flexible
approach

1. All connections are treated equally under the same failure

model in path restoration and in contrast the latest approach allows
per-connection fault-tolerance.
2. In path restorations connection demands are known at the
time of network design and change very rarely. Hence this method
cannot be applied to an environment where short-lived channels are
setup and torn-down frequently. In contrast the latest approach needs
only the information that can easily be obtained at run-time i.e.

(a) Any algorithm may select a backup path.

(b) Space resource allocation may be done with the given
routing results.
CONNECTION ESTABLISHMENT
A backup channel does not consume any bandwidth in
normal situation, as it does not carry any data until it is
activated. However a backup channel is not free since it
requires the same amount of resources to be reserved as its
primary channel in order to provide the same quality of service
upon its activation. But backup channels are too expensive to be
useful for multimedia networking.

This resource sharing technique called backup

multiplexing was developed. By this we reserve only a very
small fraction of link resources needed for all channels going
thro the link. With backup multiplexing backup channels are
over booked by a Meta admission, test, in which some existing
backup channels are not accounted for in the admission test of
new backup channel. Our strategy is to multiplex those
backups, which are less likely to be, activated backup channel
Bit. Bit of two different connections i.e. the probability of
simultaneous failures of their respective primary channels is
given by S (Bi, Bj). Bi & Bj are multiplexed if S (Bi, Bj) is
smaller than a certain threshold V, called the multiplexing
degree, which is specific to each backup. More accurately if S
(Bi, Bj) < Vi, Bj can be multiplexed with Bi. The smaller the V
of a backup, the higher fault tolerance will result, since, fewer
backups will be multiplexed with it.
FAILURE DETECTION
Effective failure detection with high coverage and low
latency is essential for failure recovery. Instead of adopting
expensive failure reduction techniques. We use behavior-based
detection techniques that do not require special hard work
support and hence can be used in any network.

1. End-to-End method and

2. Neighbor detection method.

1. End-to-end detection involved both the source and

destination notes of a real time channel. The source node regularly
injects “Channel hear beats” i.e. a sort of real time message into the
channel message stream and the intermediate modes on a channels do
not discriminate channel heart beats from data messages. The
destination note can monitor the no. Of data messages lost as the heart
beat contains sequence no. of data message lost. If the message rate
exceeds threshold the destination node declares the channel has failed.

2. Neighbor detection resembles the gateway failure

protocol in the Internet. Adjacent nodes periodically exchange node
heart beats (“ I am alive”). If the node does not receive heartbeat from
one of its neighbors for a certain period, it declares all the channels
going through the silent Neighbor as fail.
FAILURE REPORTING AND CHANNEL
SWITCHNG
The node that detects the failure of a channel should
report to the node responsible for channel switching.
a. Failure reports are sent from the failure detecting nodes
to the end nodes of failed channels.
b. Failed reports are delivered through healthy segments of
the failed channels paths.
c. Each failure report contains the channel-id of the failure
channel.

The latest approach handles multiple simultaneous

failures very naturally and easily. If multiple failures occur to a
channel, only one failure report will reach its end nodes; all
other reports will be lost due to the failures themselves or
discarded by the intermediate nodes.

When an end node of an real-time communication

channel receives a failure report on a primary channel, it selects
one of this healthy backups and sends an activation message
along the path of the selected backup.

The transmission of failure reports and activation

messages is time critical, because their delays directly affect the
service disruption time. To achieve delay-bounded and robust
transmission of time-critical control messages, we transmit
them over special purpose real-time channels, called RCCs, one
in each direction, are established on every link of the network.
If the capacity of the RCC on each link is large enough to
accommodate all time-critical control messages on the link,
timely delivery of such messages can be guaranteed.

RESOURCE RECONFIGURATION
 In a normal situation, the dependability QoS of a
connection is maintained by limiting the admission of new
connections not to impair the QoS of existing connections.
Upon occurrence of a failure, more explicit actions (i.e.
resource reconfiguration) need to be taken to preserve the QoS
of the connections, which are directly or indirectly affected by
the failure.

Even when a connection is not directly inflicted with

failures, its dependability QoS can be affected by the failure
recovery for other connections. This is because multiple
backups share spare resources, and activation of a backup will
reduce the spare resources on its path, and as a result the
remaining backups on this path may not receive their original
QoS. At such links, more spare resource has to be allocated to
maintain the same QoS for the remaining backups. Here the
network has to take care of a situation where there are not
enough resources available at a link to match the need for
additional spare resources. The network can resolve such
situations by moving some of the remaining backups to
different paths or by QoS degradation.

PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS
As a metric of the fault-tolerance level achieved by each
backup configuration, the ratio of fast recovery to the number
of failed primary channels was used. For instance, a 90 percent
fast recovery ratio means that 90 percent of the connections
whose primary failed were recovered by using their backup
channels.
 The multiplexing backup was even further improved by
using the double was achievable with significantly less spare
resources in the double backup configuration.
In the mesh network, the reduction of spare resources by
multiplexing is not as great as in the tours network. This is
because the absence of wrapped links in the mesh network
makes the primary channel paths more concentrated on the
central region of the network, those discouraging multiplexing
among their backups.

CONCLUSION
The main focus of this article is twofold. First, we
surveyed existing approaches to dependable multimedia
communication and discussed their pros and cons. Second, we
presented a new scheme, which selectively adopts only the
merits of existing approaches without shortcomings.

This scheme scales well because it does not require each

node to maintain global knowledge of the network traffic
conditions to generate any type of messages to be broadcast.
Control messages are sent only over those paths of channels
affected by failures. Backup multiplexing s performed bop by
hop; therefore, at each link only the knowledge of primary
channels whose backups traverse the link is required. Making a
backup channel establishment message carry the path
information of its primary channel can easily collect such
information. Since the latest scheme is designed without any
assumption for a particular real-time communication scheme, it
can be placed on top of any existing (possibly independently
developed) real –time channel protocols.