Fast rerouting mechanism for a protected label switched path

Abstract

This paper presents a fast and efficient mechanism for rerouting traffic when there is a link failure or congestion problem in multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) networks. Our method uses a predefined, alternative label switched path (LSP) in order to restore traffic and significantly improves the performance in comparison to similar, existing proposals. We show that our proposal is not only able to reduce the average traffic delay due to path restoration, but also eliminates the problem of packet disorder. The latter-as is well known-can have significant impact on the overall, end-to-end performance. We have simulated our mechanism using the MPLS network simulator (MNS) and the performance metrics were compared to other proposals. The simulation results show that our new mechanism provides a significant improvement on average delay while eliminating packet disorder. The combination of these two improvements helps to minimize the effects of link failure and/or congestion. This facilitates the rapid release of network resources and improves the end-to-end performance of MPLS networks.