Interface specific fast failure rerouting for load balanced ip networks

Abstract

As a failure occurs, the affected traffic is quickly switched to backup paths for a network performing a fast IP rerouting. However, the rerouted traffic may cause congestion along the backup paths that would result in more packet losses than purely discarded the affected flows. In this paper, we take the concept of interface specific forwarding (ISF) to provide more flexibility in determining load balanced traffic rerouting. This problem is formulated as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem, in which network survivability and traffic load distribution are jointly considered and the traffic load on the most congested link is to be minimized. Since this is an NP-hard problem, we further decompose it into several sub-problems which are solved optimally and their solutions are combined to provide an approximate solution to the ILP problem. The numerical results delineate that the proposed scheme achieves high survivability, load balancing and lesser bandwidth consumption at the expense of slightly raising the average path hop count.