Our objective is to provide recovery and ensure robustness in the presence of heterogeneous nodes in access networks. Finally, access node management and backbone network management must interface in such a manner that necessary information is passed to ensure robustness and recovery without passing information that is superfluous, burdensome, or sensitive. The integration of access node and backbone network management for the purposes of robustness and recovery is one of the principal novel contributions of our program. In the absence of planning, federated ownership of communication networks has led to growth by aggregation. This approach does not mesh well with the infrastructure's inherently incremental expansion.
New participants enter the field by purchasing a connection at the bottom of a vast hierarchy.
Growth of communication networks by aggregation suffers from two core problems, hazard expansion and geographic rigidity. A connection between end users in a strongly hierarchical, deeply imbedded network developed through aggregation typically employs many instances of line and concentrator hardware. Ownership of individual components along such a route is varied and typically unknown to the end user, thus each component is both a point of failure and a security hazard. Geographic rigidity, the second core problem, refers to the inability of growth by aggregation to incrementally adapt an existing backbone network to changing geographic requirements. Our approach is to investigate robustness and recovery in direct access networks, an innovative approach to the incremental construction of reliable, scalable, and affordable high-speed networks.