IP fast reroute in networks with shared risk links

Abstract

IP fast reroute is a mechanism that is used to reroute packets around a failed link as soon as the link fails. Most of the IP fast reroute mechanisms, that have been proposed so far, focus on single or dual link failures but can not handle Shared Risk Link Group (SRLG) failures when several links fail at the same time because of some common underlying component failure. Furthermore, most of current work is based on the assumption that each node in the network has access to some global topology information of the network. In this paper, we present the first IP fast reroute mechanism for SRLG failures that is not based on the assumption that the nodes in the network have global topology information of the network. In our mechanism, nodes in the network use "relay bits" to identify themselves as "relay nodes" for a reroute link in a fully distributed mannner. Through simulation, we show that our mechanism succeeds in rerouting around SRLG failures alomst 100% of the time, with average length of a reroute path about 1.5 times the re-converged shortest path. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.