In a network environment, the
Quality of Service becomes an important issue particularly for applications involved with real-time
multimedia streaming. Any
transmission failure may cause service disruption and the failure has to be quickly recovered to minimize the
impact. A unified home networking standard based on existing media in home has been developed to meet the increasing demand for bandwidth, reliability and availability. However, the fault tolerant protocol adopted by the home networking standard is based on an advanced selective ARQ (Automatic
Retransmission Request) protocol which may take hundreds of
millisecond to establish a
backup channel. Alternatively, a hot standby
backup channel has to be used to achieve quick switch without
data loss at the expense of increased
power consumption by the hot standby channel. The present invention discloses a quick-switch modem that can quickly switch from a
primary channel to a
backup channel upon detection of
transmission failure. The quick-switch modem contains an additional interface between the modems for the
primary channel and the secondary channel. In order to achieve quick failure detection and data re-
route, the quick-switch modem relies on lower
layers of the
network link to facilitate failure detection and data re-
route. Consequently, the
switching time is substantially reduced without the need of hot standby. Alternatively, the quick-switch modem can be configured for
load sharing to enhance overall available bandwidth.