A framework for fast IP rerouting

Abstract

As the Internet takes an increasingly central role in day to day communications infrastructure, the slow convergence of routing protocols after a network failure becomes a growing problem. To assure fast recovery from link and node failures in IP networks, it presents a new recovery scheme called Multiple Routing Configurations (MRC). The proposed scheme guarantees recovery in all single failure scenarios, using a single mechanism to handle both link and node failures, and without knowing the root cause of the failure. MRC is strictly connectionless, and assumes only destination based hop-by-hop forwarding. MRC is based on keeping additional routing information in the routers, and allows packet forwarding to continue on an alternative output link immediately after the detection of a failure. It can be implemented with only minor changes to existing solutions. The present MRC analyze its performance with respect to scalability, backup path lengths, and load distribution after a failure. It also shows how an estimate of the traffic demands in the network can be used to improve the distribution of the recovered traffic, and thus reduce the chances of congestion when MRC is used.