Abstract
Current and future distributed real-time applications, such as teleconferencing, remote collaboration, and distance learning, require the underlying communication network to provide multicast service. Furthermore, these applications often involve the exchange of multimedia information with stringent QoS requirement (e.g., bounded end-to-end delay). If a failure occurs in the today’s high capacity and high speed networks, then it can result in a huge loss of bandwidth, loss of service to users, and loss of bandwidth to the operating companies. Therefore the automatic and rapid network service restoration against various unexpected failures becomes a very important issue for network operation and management. In view of this, the asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network has played a major role in both local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs).In this thesis, we consider the problem of constructing a backup virtual path in multicast ATM networks if failures happen. Multicasting is the ability of a communication network to accept a single message from an application and to deliver copies of the message to multiple recipients at different locations. A major contribution of this work is to apply a heuristic algorithm to the backup path search process instead of the goal-programming model. Experimental results indicate that using this heuristic algorithm has a number of advantages over using goal programming.The proposed heuristic algorithm gives an approximation that does not exceed in average the cost and delay time of the exact solution by more than 15%. So it is a practical multicast backup virtual path searching algorithm for large-scale networks.