The self-healing capability against network failure is one of indispensable features for the B-ISDN infrastructure. One problem in realizing such self-healing backbone network is the inefficient utilization of the large spare capacity designed for the failure-restoration purpose since it will be used only in the failure time that does not occur frequently. "Pool-capacity" is the concept that allows some VPs (virtual paths) to efficiently utilize this spare capacity part. Although the total capacity can be saved by using the "Pool Capacity," it is paid by less reliability of VPs caused by the emerging influence of indirect-failure. Thus, this influence of indirect-failure has to be considered in the capacity designing process so that network-designers can trade off the saving of capacity with the reliability level of VPs in their self-healing networks. In this paper, Damage Rate:DR which is the index to indicate the level of the influence caused by indirect-failure is defined and the pool-capacity design scheme with DR consideration is proposed. By the proposed scheme, the self-healing network with different cost (pool-capacity) can be designed according to the reliability level of VPs.

In reliable multicast communications, lost information due to packet loss should be re-multicasted. NAK-based retransmission scheme is said to be effective for scalable reliable multicast communications because it can avoid implosion of control packets. When the source sends packets faster than receiver's ability, packet loss due to buffer overflow occurs constantly at corresponding receivers. With this constant packet loss, implosion of control packets degrades total throughput seriously even in the case of NAK-based retransmission scheme. In order to prevent this kind of constant packet loss at receivers, flow control scheme should be implemented for reliable multicast communications. In the paper, we propose a new flow control scheme suitable for NAK-based retransmission scheme. From the viewpoint of flow control, receiving a NAK indicates that transmission rate is too high. However, in multicast communications, multiple NAKs may be generated for a corresponding packet. If the transmission rate is decreased simly by receiving a NAK, the rate may be decreased excessively. In the paper, logging information of transmission rate stored at the sender is proposed to be effective to prevent the transmission rate. Performance evaluation by computer simulation shows that the proposed scheme notably improves throughput performance compared with the case of no flow control.

For the realization of the very high-speed data transmission over wide area network, the HIPPI-ATM conversion for connecting two remote HIPPI end systems is specified by ANSI. Since the credit scheme is adopted for the flow control on the ATM part in the specification, the propagation delay influences the remarkable transfer throughput degradation with the longer distance between end systems. In this paper, two priority types of HIPPI bursts are proposed, which include the flag indicating the priority, high priority or low priority. We propose the hybrid scheme that the credit scheme is adopted only for sending the high priority HIPPI bursts and the source can send low priority HIPPI bursts without reserving buffers in the receiver. In order to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, we show the characteristics of transfer performance and low priority bursts loss ratio v. s. transmission distance by simulation. Furthermore, we introduce the implemental example of the proposed scheme in the MPEG video transmission application, and show it's good performance.