A fault-tolerant hierarchical broadcast network
William E. Burr · 1984
Hierarchical star or rooted tree networks have been implemented and have many desirable characteristics, including excellent performance, conceptual simplicity, and suitability for optical fiber implementations.They do, however, have a single point of vulnerability t o catastrophic failure (the master or root hub) as well as vulnerabilities to single failures of links or hubs high in the hierarchy, which could disable large portions of the network.Hierarchical networks a r e first described, and their performance is compared t o other local network alternatives.A generalization of the hub and network structure is then presented, which adds redundant network components t o eliminate this vulnerability and make an extremely robust and fault-tolerant network.