| Research in the area of data communications and networking is well and alive as this collection of contributions show. The book has received enhanced contributions from the authors that published in the inaugural volume of the International Journal of Business Data Communications and Networking (http://www.idea-group.com/ijbdcn). The chapters are divided in four themes: (1) network design and application issues, (2) mobility, (3) wireless deployment and applications, and (4) network security. The first two sections gathering the larger number of chapters, which is not surprising given the popularity of the issues presented on those sections. Within each section the chapters have been roughly organized following the Physical layer to Application layer sequence with lower-level issues discussed first. This is not an exact sequence since some chapters deal with cross-layer aspects; however, it facilitates the reading of the book in a more-or-less logical manner. The resulting volume is a valuable snapshot of some of the most interesting research activities taking place in the field of business data communications and networking.
The first section, Network Design and Application Issues, starts with Chapter I, “Design of High Capacity Survivable Networks,” written by Varadharajan Sridhar and June Park. In it the authors define Survivability as the capability of keeping at least “one path between specified network nodes so that some or all of traffic between nodes is routed through”. Based on that definition the chapter goes on to discuss the issues associated with the design of a survivable telecommunications network architecture that uses high-capacity transport facilities. Their model considers the selection of capacitated links and the routing of multicommodity traffic flows with the goal of minimizing the overall network cost. Two node disjoint paths are selected for each commodity. In case of failure of the primary path, a portion of the traffic for each commodity will be rerouted through the secondary path. The methodology presented in the chapter can be used by the network designer to construct cost-effective high capacity survivable ring networks of low to medium capacity. |