Packet re-cycling: eliminating packet losses due to network failures

This paper presents Packet Re-cycling (PR), a technique that takes advantage of cellular graph embeddings to reroute packets that would otherwise be dropped in case of link or node failures. The technique employs only one bit in the packet header to cover any single link failures, and in the order of log2(d) bits to cover all non-disconnecting failure combinations, where d is the diameter of the network. We show that our routing strategy is effective and that its path length stretch is acceptable for realistic topologies. The packet header overhead incurred by PR is very small, and the extra memory and packet processing time required to implement it at each router are insignificant. This makes PR suitable for loss-sensitive, mission-critical network applications.