Self-healing ring

Like roadway and water distribution systems, a loop or ring is used to provide redundancy.

The system consists of a ring of bidirectional links between a set of stations, typically using optical fiber communications.

Self-healing rings offer high levels of resilience at low cost, since it is often geographically easy to take multiple paths across the landscape and link them up into a ring with very little extra fiber length.

Recent submarine communications cables are typically built in pairs to function as a self-healing ring.

Very high resilience systems are typically built on interconnected meshes of self-healing rings.