Design and Implementation of Path Failure Detection and Recovery Mechanism for Multihomed HIMALIS Network

Abstract

We have designed the Heterogeneity Inclusion and Mobility Adaptation through Locator ID Separation (HIMALIS) network architecture to natively support sessions transfer from one link to another independently of the network and transport layer protocols. However, lack of a prompt path failure detection mechanism in HIMALIS cannot well utilize multiple links to protect against path failures. In this paper, we propose a complete path recovery mechanism that consists of path failure detection, lively path exploration, and path recovery processes. In particular, the failure detection mechanism is based on monitoring of data sending and receiving instances in end hosts by employing two timers, probe timer and keepalive timer. In case of path failure caused by gateway's upstream link down, the gateway provides the link failure notification to the host for expediting the detection process. We also present an overview of implementation of the mechanism. The implemented functions are verified by using both TCP and UDP applications and evaluated in a 21-node-scale network-emulation environment. The results show that the proposed mechanism provides fast failure detection, about 7 s which is much faster than the failure detection carried out based on TCP retransmission timeout which may take 5 min in the worst case, under both site- and host-multihoming configurations. The results also show that the proposed mechanism takes only about 200 ms to detect gateway's upstream link down.