Alan F. Graves

Clinical grade - a foundation for healthcare communications networks

Healthcare is adopting information technology as an integral part of clinical workflows and processes themselves. This places substantial demands upon the performance and behavior of such networks, especially as the paper records systems are retired, leading to the fundamental attributes of clinical grade networks for healthcare.

Structures of high-capacity reliable telecommunication networks

Reliability is ascertained in an efficient agile network through structural simplicity, storage of route-set description at each edge node, rapid reporting of a failure to edge nodes that may be affected, and rapid rerouting of affected connections. Structural simplicity results in routes of a small number of hops each, thus enabling rapid rerouting. A proposed wide-coverage high-capacity network that scales to multiples of petabits per second and can encompass millions of edge nodes employs both fast-switching time-shared optical nodes and channel-switching optical core connectors. The core capacity is adaptively shared. Thus, failure of a proportion of core connectors may reduce network connectivity but would not result in a major service discontinuity. Several other simple structures can be devised to enable rapid reporting and rerouting, thus realizing economical highly-reliable networks.