North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Cascading Failures Could Crash the Global Internet
Hello; A packet switched network can be engineered against cascading failures in a way that's hard for a circuit switched network. Every time you see a random wait in a protocol, it's a good bet that the protocol writers were trying to protect against the tight coupling that leads to cascading failures. Regards Marshall Eubanks On Sunday, February 9, 2003, at 10:07 AM, Jack Bates wrote: From: "Stewart, William C (Bill), SALES"A prime example of this theory was the large network I was using back whenI think the key is that the failures described in the paper are caused by overload rather than other things - too much demand for power blows out the generator, and without it, the grid tries to get the power from the next nearest generators, which overload and fail, and try to pull an even large amount from the _next_ nearest, etc. So the bit about heterogeneity is probably referring to the fact that some nodes are bigger or better-connected than others, and are more likely to blow out a bunch of their neighbors when they fail and shed a big load. That's not really how Internet systems usually fail.
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