Backup Bandwidth Research Articles

Fault tolerance in TCAM-limited software defined networks

In Software Defined Networks (SDNs), while a proactive fault tolerance based on the local rerouting approach enables fast failure recovery, it requires to install forwarding rules for the backup paths in the switch Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) in advance. Since the TCAM size is limited and forwarding rules are long, using large number of forwarding rules for backup paths leads to frequent eviction of flows at the switches. To guarantee the bandwidth requirement for a flow upon a link failure, bandwidth reservation is also required on the backup path. Inefficient backup bandwidth usage will cause rejection of increased number of flows. In this paper, we address the problem of proactive fault tolerance in SDNs, considering the above challenges by adopting the local rerouting approach. We develop an optimization programming formulation that determines the set of backup paths to protect a flow while minimizing the number of additional rules and bandwidth required for the backup paths. Since this problem is computationally prohibitive, we develop two heuristic algorithms, namely Forward Local Rerouting (FLR) and Backward Local Rerouting (BLR) to compute backup paths so as to improve TCAM and bandwidth usage efficiency. We propose a flexible adaptive failure recovery framework that takes the decision of using FLR or BLR based on the network state. We evaluate the proposed algorithms through simulations and compare their performance with the optimal solution. The results show that the proposed algorithms perform very close to the optimal solution and reduce the number of additional rules required to protect a flow by up to 75% compared to the approaches that do not consider the limited size of TCAM. The results also show that the proposed algorithms are effective in terms of backup bandwidth efficiency and meet the carrier-grade requirement with the recovery time below 50 ms.

공유 백업 대역폭을 갖는 다중 경로 지원 가상 네트워크 자원 할당 방안

인터넷의 성장은 다양한 분야에서 정보통신 기술의 활용한 새로운 서비스를 창출하고 있지만, 인터넷의 구조 적인 문제로 인하여 다양한 네트워크 구조와 서비스의 발전을 저해하고 있다. 네트워크 가상화는 현재 인터넷의 구 조적 문제를 극복할 수 있는 대안으로 연구되고 있으며, 많은 연구 분야 중에서도 가상 네트워크 자원 할당 방안이 중요 연구 분야중의 하나이다. 본 논문에서는 가상 네트워크의 신뢰성을 향상시켜 네트워크상에서의 단일 링크 장애 를 복구할 수 있는 방안을 제안한다. 다수의 가상 네트워크가 하나의 공유 백업 대역폭을 이용하여 다중 경로를 지원 함으로 신뢰성을 향상시킬 수 있다. 가상 네트워크들이 백업자원을 공유함으로 한정된 물리 자원의 효율성을 향상시 키고, 사전에 할당된 백업 자원을 이용하여 빠른 장애 복구가 가능하다는 장점이 있다. 실험을 통하여 제안된 알고리 즘의 다중 경로 생성 소요 시간이 기존 연구보다 약 50% 정도 성능 향상되었음을 확인하였다.

Partial spatial protection for provisioning differentiated reliability in FSTR-based Metro Ethernet networks

Fast Spanning Tree Reconnection (FSTR) is a newly proposed restoration method by us to handle link failures in Metro Ethernet networks. Compared with other methods existing in the literature, FSTR has the advantages of lower signaling overhead, faster recovery and lesser rerouted traffic. However, FSTR lacks its own mechanism to support differentiated reliability (DiR), which is required by voice and data services, as well as a variety of emerging multimedia applications such as video conferencing and online gaming. In DiR, a traffic request is guaranteed a minimum reliability/protection degree in the event of a link failure, according to clients’ requirements. Unnecessary redundant/backup network resources are thus eliminated in DiR and, as a result, the blocking probability of traffic requests decreases, compared to that in full protection where 100% reliability is guaranteed for all traffic requests.In this work, we propose to use partial spatial protection (PSP) mechanism at the spanning tree layer to provision DiR in FSTR-based Metro Ethernet networks. The basic idea of PSP to provide DiR is that a traffic request is protected using backup bandwidth against failure of only a subset of the links on its route, according to the specified reliability requirement. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on the problem of PSP at the spanning tree level, a layer unique to Ethernet where traffic requests are required to be mapped onto different trees and the protection mechanisms usually involve tree restoration/reconstruction. We formulate the optimal PSP problem in FSTR-based Metro Ethernet networks as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model. We develop a heuristic algorithm to reduce the computational complexity in implementing PSP. The heuristic algorithm is designed based on a known 12-approximation approach to the Knapsack problem. We describe the recovery operations of PSP in the event of a link failure. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed PSP solution can significantly reduce the blocking probability of traffic requests in an FSTR-based Metro Ethernet network, compared to full protection.

The backup reprovisioning problem of NEPCs on survivable WDM networks

Protection techniques for optical networks mainly rely on pre-allocated backup bandwidth, which may not be able to provide full protection guarantee when multiple failures occur in a network. After recovering from the previous failure, if failure occurs again, unprotected or vulnerable lightpaths cannot be recovered. In this paper, the minimal backup reprovisioning (MBR) problem is studied, in which, the node-encircling protecting cycles (NEPCs) scheme is considered for single node-failure on WDM networks. The NEPC Recovery Algorithm is proposed to recover the protecting capabilities of the NEPC. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed method is better than that of the traditional one.

Comparison of recovery schemes to maximize restorable throughput in multicast networks

Multicast networks have many applications especially in real-time content delivery systems. For high-quality services, users do not expect to witness any interruption; thus, network link failure has to be handled gracefully. In unicast networks there are many approaches for dealing with link failures using backup paths. Recently, Cohen and Nakibly categorized these methods, provided linear programming formulations for optimizing network throughput under the assumption that the paths are splitable, and compared them experimentally. In this work, we take their approach and apply to the multicast failure recovery problem. We propose backup bandwidth allocation algorithms based on linear programs to maximize the throughput, and perform an experimental study on the performance of recovery schemes. We study many recovery schemes in multicast networks and propose a new recovery scheme that performs better than all other recovery scheme except the one that recomputed the whole multicast tree from scratch for each link failure.

Self‐protecting networking using dynamic p‐cycle construction within link capacity constraint

ABSTRACTThe p‐cycle design problem has been extensively studied because it can provide both ring‐like fast self‐protection speed and spare capacity efficiency of path protection scheme. However, p‐cycle provisioning for dynamic traffic has not been fully addressed. Most related works have not considered link capacity in the construction of p‐cycles, which may cause problems in practice because the protection paths may not have enough backup bandwidth. In this paper, with the consideration of link capacity, we present a sufficient and necessary condition that guarantees p‐cycles for providing enough protection bandwidth. Based on this condition, we propose an effective solution to provide connections for dynamic requests with the property that each link used for a connection is protected by a p‐cycle. Simulation results show that our dynamic p‐cycle provisioning solution outperforms the traditional path protection scheme. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The backup reprovisioning problem of FIPP p-cycles for node failure on survivable WDM networks

Protection techniques for optical networks mainly rely on pre-allocated backup bandwidth, which may not be able to provide full protection guarantee when multiple failures occur in a network. After recovering from the previous failure, if failure occurs again, unprotected or vulnerable lightpaths cannot be recovered. In this paper, the minimal backup reprovisioning (MBR) problem is studied, in which the failure-independent path protecting p-cycles (FIPP p-cycles) scheme is considered for single-node failure on WDM networks. After recovering the affected lightpaths from a node failure, the goal of the MBR is to re-arrange the protecting and available resources such that working paths can be protected against next node failure if possible. An algorithm is designed to recover the protecting capabilities of the FIPP p-cycles, unless there is no sufficient network resource. The simulation results of the proposed method are also given.

A study of the backup reprovisioning problem for FIPP p-cycles on WDM networks

As networks grow in size and complexity, both the probability and the impact of failures increase. The pre-allocated backup bandwidth cannot provide 100% protection guarantee when multiple failures occur in a network. In this article, we focus on how to recover the protecting capabilities of FIPP (Failure-independent path-protecting) p-cycles against the subsequent links failure on WDM networks, after recovering the working paths affected by the failure of link. Two recovering policies are designed to recover the protecting capabilities of the FIPP p-cycles if possible, unless there is no sufficient network resource. They are Cycle Recovery Policy and Path Recovery Policy. In addition, a Cycle Adjust algorithm is proposed and used to recover the affected cycles. The simulation results of the proposed methods are also given.

Algorithms and Models for Backup Reprovisioning in WDM Networks

Protection techniques for optical networks mainly rely on preallocated backup bandwidth, which may not be able to provide full protection guarantee when multiple failures occur in a network. To protect against multiple concurrent potential failures and to utilize the available resources more efficiently, strategies such as backup reprovisioning (BR) rearrange backups of protected connections after one failure occurs or, more generally, whenever the network state changes, e.g., when a new request arrives or terminates. Recently, new solutions for automatized management in optical networks promise to allow customers to specify on-demand the terms of the service level agreement (SLA) to be guaranteed by the service provider. In this paper, we study different backup reprovisioning techniques able to further reduce the capacity requirements exploiting the knowledge, among the other service level specifications (SLSs), of the connection holding time.

Survivable routing algorithm with mixed shared protection in fault‐tolerant GMPLS multi‐layered optical networks

AbstractIn this paper, we studied survivability in general multi‐protocol label switching (GMPLS) multi‐layered optical networks and proposed a novel mixed shared protection algorithm (MSPA) based on the integrated layered graph (ILG) to tolerate single‐fibre link failure. The ILG is composed of one virtual topology layer (VTL), corresponding to IP/MPLS layer; multiple wavelength‐plane layers (WPLs), corresponding to the wavelength‐division multiplexing (WDM) optical layer; and some virtual links that connect the VTL to each WPL in order to solve the problem on routing, wavelength assignment and low‐speed traffic grooming. For every connection request, the MSPA first computes a single‐hop or multi‐hop label switching path (LSP) pair, involving a working LSP and a physical link‐disjoint backup LSP in the VTL. If the LSP pair is not found in the VTL, the MSPA computes the new LSP pair in the WPL. Conversely, if the new LSP pair is not detected in the WPL, the MSPA computes the hybrid multi‐hop LSP pair in the ILG. In the MSPA, if the two working LSPs are in physical link‐disjoint, their corresponding backup LSPs can share the backup bandwidth. In addition, the working LSPs and the backup LSPs can also share the same mixed of wavelength, in which the different bandwidths can be assigned to different working and backup LSPs. Simulation results show that, compared to previous algorithm, the MSPA can obtain a better bandwidth utilisation ratio (BUR) with a lower blocking probability. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Comprehensive Study on Backup-Bandwidth Reprovisioning After Network-State Updates in Survivable Telecom Mesh Networks

The capacity of a telecom fiber is very high and continues to increase, due to the advances in wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technology. Thus, a fiber-link failure may cause huge data (and revenue) loss. Reprovisioning (or re-optimization) of backup (or protection) bandwidth is an effective approach to improve network survivability while preventing existing services from unnecessary interruption. Most research works to date focus on applying backup-resource reprovisioning when a network failure occurs, or at some particular intervals over a certain time period.

Integrated dynamic shared protection algorithm for GMPLS networks

The path protection approach is widely investigated as a survivability solution for GMPLS networks, which has the advantage of efficient capacity utilization. However, there is a problem of the path protection approach that searching a disjoint backup path for a primary path is often unsuccessful. In order to resolve this problem, an integrated dynamic shared protection (IDSP) algorithm is proposed. The main idea of the proposed algorithm is that the path protection approach is first used to establish a backup path for the primary path; if the establishment is unsuccessful, then the primary path is dynamically divided into segments whose hop count are not fixed but not more than the limitation calculated by the equations introduced. In this proposal, backup bandwidth sharing is allowed to improve the capacity utilization ratio, which makes the link cost function quite different from previous ones. Simulation experiments are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method compared with previous methods. Numerical results show that IDSP can not only achieve low protection failure probability but can also gain a better tradeoff between the protection overbuild and the average recovery time.

Design and analysis of partial protection mechanisms in groomed optical WDM mesh networks

We consider the problem of survivable network design in traffic-groomed optical WDM mesh networks that support subwavelength capacity connections. In typical survivable network designs, individual sessions are provided either full protection or no protection. We consider a quality of protection (QoP) framework where a connection is provided partial protection, i.e., when a link failure occurs on the primary path, the protection bandwidth provided on the backup path is less than or equal to the primary bandwidth. Each connection request specifies the primary bandwidth and a minimum backup bandwidth required. The network will guarantee at least the minimum backup bandwidth and, if capacity is available, higher backup bandwidth up to the primary path's bandwidth. The advantage of such a model is that it can reduce backup capacity requirements based on connection needs leading to lower blocking probability and lower network costs. We consider two scenarios: (i) a network with static traffic that is designed using an integer linear program (ILP) formulation and (ii) a network with dynamic traffic for which we present a heuristic connection admission control algorithm that prevents backup resource contention during recovery from a link failure. The results quantify the gain in blocking probability for different partial protection scenarios. The mechanism proposed to counter backup contention is seen to provide an average of 120% reduction in the contention among backup paths of connections traversing a link, especially when the number of wavelengths in each link is small.

Ultrafast Potential-Backup-Cost (PBC)-Based Shared Path Protection Schemes

This paper describes a novel ultrafast heuristic algorithm to address an NP-hard optimization problem. One of the significant and nonintuitive results is that the schemes based on the heuristic can achieve a better overall performance than their time-consuming integer-linear-programming-based counterparts. More specifically, the proposed schemes are useful in providing an online shared path protection by establishing survivable connections in high-speed networks. The advantage of our heuristic algorithm over the existing heuristic algorithms in finding a pair of link-disjoint paths, which are called active and backup paths, comes from the following salient feature. It uses a so-called potential-backup-cost (PBC) function when selecting an active path in the first phase to take into consideration the backup bandwidth needed by the corresponding backup path, which has yet to be chosen in the second phase. The PBC function is derived mathematically based on the statistical analysis of experimental data. While the use of PBC only requires partial aggregate information on how the existing connections are established in a network, it can also be applied even more effectively when complete information is available.

Multiple link failure recovery in survivable optical networks

Survivability is of critical importance in high-speed optical communication networks. A typical approach to the design of survivable networks is through a protection scheme that pre-determines and reserves backup bandwidth considering single/double link failure scenarios. In this article, a greedy algorithm is presented to reserve backup bandwidth considering multiple (F > 2) link (SRLG) failure scenarios. A bandwidth-saving joint selection scheme of working and protection paths is presented for protection against random multiple-link failures under dynamic traffic. Simulation shows that the algorithm can achieve maximum sharing of backup bandwidth for protection against random multiple-link failure with significant amount of bandwidth saving.

Backup reprovisioning to remedy the effect of multiple link failures in WDM mesh networks

As networks grow in size and complexity, both the probability and the impact of failures increase. The pre-allocated backup bandwidth, which has been widely investigated in the literature, may not be able to provide full protection guarantee when multiple failures occur in a network. In this study, we consider multiple concurrent failures where concurrent means that a new failure occurs before a previous failure is repaired. To combat the effect of multiple concurrent failures, new backups can be reprovisioned after one failure such that the next potential failure can be handled effectively and efficiently. We consider dynamic traffic where a pair of link-disjoint primary and backup paths is provisioned when a new connection request arrives. After a failure occurs, the affected connections switch traffic from their primary paths to backup paths. To protect against next potential failure, we reprovision new backups for connections that become unprotected or vulnerable because of losing their primary or their backup due to the previous failure or due to backup resource sharing. This approach is called Minimal Backup Reprovisioning (MBR). An alternative approach is to globally rearrange backups for all connections after one failure occurs, which is called Global Backup Reprovisioning (GBR). Backup reprovisioning can be performed whenever the network's state changes, e.g., (1) when a new request arrives, (2) when an existing connection terminates, (3) when a network failure occurs, (4) when a failed link/node is repaired, etc., to utilize the available resources more efficiently or to recover quickly from the next failure. In this study, we perform MBR or GBR after one network failure occurs to protect against the next potential failure in a wavelength-convertible WDM mesh network. The link-vector network model which can maximally explore the backup-sharing potential is assumed in this study. We then analyze the complexity of MBR and GBR under such a network model. A reprovisioning algorithm is proposed for MBR which can significantly reduce the connection vulnerability without the knowledge of the location of the next failure. In GBR, both integer linear program (ILP) and heuristic-based approaches are proposed. We compare capacity requirement and computational complexity of MBR to that of GBR through numerical examples. MBR demonstrates a good tradeoff between complexity and capacity efficiency to handle multiple concurrent failures

Efficient algorithms for shared backup allocation in networks with partial information

We study efficient algorithms for establishing reliable connections with bandwidth guarantees in communication networks. In the normal mode of operation, each connection uses a primary path to deliver packets from the source to the destination. To ensure continuous operation in the event of an edge failure, each connection uses a set of backup bridges, each bridge protecting a portion of the primary path. To meet the bandwidth requirement of the connection, a certain amount of bandwidth must be allocated the edges of the primary path, as well as on the backup edges. In this paper, we focus on minimizing the amount of required backup allocation by sharing backup bandwidth among different connections. We consider efficient sharing schemes that require only partial information about the current state of the network. Specifically, the only information available for each edge is the total amount of primary allocation and the cost of allocating backup bandwidth on this edge. We consider the problem of finding a minimum cost backup allocation together with a set of bridges for a given primary path. We prove that this problem is \(\cal{NP}\) NP-hard and present an approximation algorithm whose performance is within\(\cal O (\log n)\) of the optimum, where n is the number of edges in the primary path. We also consider the problem of finding both a primary path and backup allocation of minimal total cost.

On the complexity of and algorithms for finding the shortest path with a disjoint counterpart

Finding a disjoint path pair is an important component in survivable networks. Since the traffic is carried on the active (working) path most of the time, it is useful to find a disjoint path pair such that the length of the shorter path (to be used as the active path) is minimized. In this paper, we first address such a Min-Min problem. We prove that this problem is NP-complete in either single link cost (e.g., dedicated backup bandwidth) or dual link cost (e.g., shared backup bandwidth) networks. In addition, it is NP-hard to obtain a K-approximation to the optimal solution for any K>1. Our proof is extended to another open question regarding the computational complexity of a restricted version of the Min-Sum problem in an undirected network with ordered dual cost links (called the MSOD problem). To solve the Min-Min problem efficiently, we introduce a novel concept called conflicting link set which provides insights into the so-called trap problem, and develop a divide-and-conquer strategy. The result is an effective heuristic for the Min-Min problem called COnflicting Link Exclusion (COLE), which can outperform other approaches in terms of both the optimality and running time. We also apply COLE to the MSOD problem to efficiently provide shared path protection and conduct comprehensive performance evaluation as well as comparison of various schemes for shared path protection. We show that COLE not only processes connection requests much faster than existing integer linear programming (ILP)-based approaches but also achieves a good balance among the active path length, bandwidth efficiency, and recovery time.

An Architecture for Differentiated Protection Against Single and Double Faults in GMPLS

In the context of an optical network GMPLS can be used to provide network robustness to faults through end-to-end path protection techniques. In this paper, we present a dynamic distributed model supporting five different classes of protection, including protection against single and double fault, with and without sharing of backup bandwidth. Beyond link and node failures we also consider protection against shared risk link group (SLRG) failure. In this paper, we briefly describe the protection model and the underlying algorithms for route selection and backup bandwidth sharing. After that we face the following issue: Which subset out of the five possible protection classes is convenient for an operator to support on the same network infrastructure? To answer this question it is fundamental to have a clear view of the trade-offs between the costs and the performances associated to each class. To achieve that we carried out an extensive performance analysis by means of simulations. For each protection class, we evaluated two fundamental performance metrics: the recovery probability under multiple faults, and the average per-demand resource usage. On the basis of such results, we are able to identify some basic guidelines driving the choice of the more convenient subset of protection classes to be implemented within a single network.

Enhanced pool sharing: a constraint-based routing algorithm for shared mesh restoration networks [Invited

Feature Issue on Next-Generation WDM Network Design and Routing (WDMN). We investigate the availability performance of networks with shared mesh restoration and demonstrate that these networks cannot provide highly available protection services. A major factor in the poor performance of shared mesh restoration is that the resources at backup links are shared among demands. If multiple service-affecting failures occur in the network a multitude of these demands will rush to utilize the spare resources on backup links. These resources are not adequate to serve all of these demands simultaneously. We propose a heuristic routing algorithm that attempts to improve the availability performance of shared mesh restoration. We measure the likelihood that a backup link will not be available to restore a newly arrived demand if or when more than one failure occurs in the network. We adjust the backup bandwidth on that link if the measured likelihood exceeds a preset threshold. As a typical representative, we show that the downtime improves by 7%, 11%, and 18% when the total backup bandwidth in the network is increased by 5%, 10%, and 20%, respectively. These values are obtained through a series of fitting experiments.