Cell Relay Archive

[marc langston <marc@sprintmail.com>]

I have recently been in a discussion concerning how ATM would handle the
case of a PVC/VCC reconnect in the event of an intermediate switch
outage.  For example, if the PVC travelled from access switch A to
intermediate switch B to intermediate switch C to access switch D, and
switch B were to fail, what would happen to the PVC?  Would it "regrow,"
or is that PVC just plain down?

I have always been under the impression that ATM "the protocol" does not
have any way to "rebuild" the PVC in the event of a switch outage.  (If
there was a trunk outage, SONET would re-route to the switch.)  But my
recent discussions have brought up points to the tune of "How can you
have a modern transport protocol that isn't able to recover from that
sort of outage?"

I haven't been able to find any information in ATM books about what
happens in outage situations, so thought of asking the question here.
Any thoughts?

Thanks,
marc