Advanced Frame Recovery in Switched Connection Inverse Multiplexing for ATM

In this paper we discuss a fault tolerance measure called Advanced Frame Recovery as an extension of the cell ordering and re-assembly protocol contained in the Switched Connection Inverse Multiplexing for ATM (SCIMA). SCIMA emulates an NxN switch with ports operating at rate kR using a kN x kN core switch with ports of rate R and allows splitting of selected virtual connections between a set of switching paths within the core switch. Advanced Frame Recovery (AFR) operates on top of SCIMA and ensures that the module performing re-assembly of a split connection is robust in the presence of persistent losses within one or more of those paths. We envision AFR to co-exist with any inverse multiplexing scheme, which relies on critical path sequence information carried inside the cell headers in order to re-assemble the split streams.