Bandwidth-adaptive VP protection using user cells

Broadband integrated services digital networks (B-ISDN), which utilize asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) technology, promise to provide a common platform for greatly increased service capacity. In terms of virtual path (VP) protection switching time, a high-bandwidth VP should be switched faster than a low-bandwidth VP in order to keep the number of damaged cells proportional to the total number of cells in that VP. This paper proposes a notification method using user cells. The proposed method can notify without interrupting the existing user cells. The total switching times were measured experimentally as 1 msec for 1.5 Mbps and 100 μsec for 15 Mbps. These results demonstrate that the bandwidth adaptive method is very fast compared to VP AIS methods, and even STM methods which require 50 msec