Load-Optimal Local Fast Rerouting for Resilient Networks

Reliable and highly available computer networks must implement resilient fast rerouting mechanisms: upon a link or node failure, an alternative route is determined quickly, without involving the network control plane. Designing such fast failover mechanisms capable of dealing with multiple concurrent failures however is challenging, as failover rules need to be installed proactively, i.e., ahead of time, without knowledge of the actual failures happening at runtime. Indeed, only little is known today about the design of resilient routing algorithms. This paper presents a deterministic local failover mechanism which we prove to result in a minimum network load for a wide range of communication patterns, solving an open problem. Our mechanism relies on the key insight that resilient routing essentially constitutes a distributed algorithm without coordination. Accordingly, we build upon the theory of combinatorial designs and develop a novel deterministic failover mechanism based on symmetric block design theory which tolerates a maximal number of Ω(n) link failures in an n-node network and in the worst-case, while always ensuring routing connectivity. In particular, we show that at least Ω(ϕ2) link failures are needed to generate a maximum link load of at least ϕ, which matches an existing bound on the number of link failures needed for an optimal failover scheme. We complement our formal analysis with simulations, showing that our approach outperforms prior schemes not only in the worst-case.