On providing fast protection with remote loop-free alternates

Up to not so long ago, loop-free alternates (LFA) was the only viable option for providing fast protection in pure IP and MultiProtocol Label Switching–Label Distribution Protocol networks. Unfortunately, LFA cannot provide protection for all possible failure cases in general. Recently, the Internet Engineering Task Force has initiated the remote loop-free alternates (rLFA) technique as a simple extension to LFA, to boost the fraction of failure cases covered by fast protection. Before further standardization and deployment, however, it is crucial to determine to what extent rLFA can improve the level of protection against single link or node failures in a general IP network, as well as to find optimization methods to tweak a network for 100 % rLFA coverage. In this paper, we take the first steps towards this goal by solving these problems in the special, but practically relevant, case when each network link is of unit cost. We also provide preliminary numerical evaluations conducted on real IP network topologies, which suggest that rLFA significantly improves the level of protection, and most networks need only 2–3 new links to be added to attain 100 % failure case coverage irrespectively of whether link or node protection is considered.

[1]  Scott Shenker,et al.  Achieving convergence-free routing using failure-carrying packets , 2007, SIGCOMM '07.

[2]  Gábor Rétvári,et al.  IP fast reroute with remote Loop-Free Alternates: The unit link cost case , 2012, 2012 IV International Congress on Ultra Modern Telecommunications and Control Systems.

[3]  Ratul Mahajan,et al.  Inferring link weights using end-to-end measurements , 2002, IMW '02.

[4]  A. Kirstadter,et al.  Improving the resilience in IP networks , 2003, Workshop on High Performance Switching and Routing, 2003, HPSR..

[5]  Jeff Tantsura,et al.  IP Fast Re-Route with Fast Notification , 2012 .

[6]  Chen-Nee Chuah,et al.  Failure Inferencing Based Fast Rerouting for Handling Transient Link and Node Failures , 2005, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2006. 25TH IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

[7]  Teresa Gomes,et al.  Resilient routing in optical networks using SRLG-disjoint path pairs of min-sum cost , 2011, Telecommunication Systems.

[8]  Tarik Cicic.  An Upper Bound on the State Requirements of Link-Fault Tolerant Multi-Topology Routing , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Communications.

[9]  P. Merindol,et al.  Providing protection and restoration with distributed multipath routing , 2008, 2008 International Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems.

[10]  Gábor Rétvári,et al.  IP Fast ReRoute: Lightweight Not-Via without Additional Addresses , 2009, IEEE INFOCOM 2009.

[11]  Alia Atlas,et al.  Basic Specification for IP Fast Reroute: Loop-Free Alternates , 2008, RFC.

[12]  Christophe Diot,et al.  An approach to alleviate link overload as observed on an IP backbone , 2003, IEEE INFOCOM 2003. Twenty-second Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37428).

[13]  Stewart Bryant,et al.  IP Fast Reroute Using Not-via Addresses , 2006 .

[14]  Gaeil An,et al.  An Efficient Rerouting Scheme for MPLS-Based Recovery and Its Performance Evaluation , 2002, Telecommun. Syst..

[15]  Aubin Jarry.  Fast reroute paths algorithms , 2013, Telecommun. Syst..

[16]  Muriel Médard,et al.  Redundant trees for preplanned recovery in arbitrary vertex-redundant or edge-redundant graphs , 1999, TNET.

[17]  Gábor Rétvári,et al.  Network optimization techniques for improving fast IP-level resilience with loop-free alternates , 2011 .

[18]  Clarence Filsfils,et al.  Remote LFA FRR , 2012 .

[19]  Michael Menth,et al.  Comparison of IP-based and explicit paths for one-to-one fast reroute in MPLS networks , 2013, Telecommun. Syst..

[20]  Stewart Bryant,et al.  IP Fast Reroute Framework , 2010, RFC.

[21]  Chen-Nee Chuah,et al.  Proactive vs reactive approaches to failure resilient routing , 2004, IEEE INFOCOM 2004.

[22]  John Moy,et al.  OSPF Version 2 , 1998, RFC.

[23]  Gábor Rétvári,et al.  Optimizing IGP link costs for improving IP-level resilience , 2011, 2011 8th International Workshop on the Design of Reliable Communication Networks (DRCN).

[24]  Gábor Rétvári,et al.  Optimizing IGP link costs for improving IP-level resilience with Loop-Free Alternates , 2013, Comput. Commun..

[25]  Stewart Bryant,et al.  IP Fast Reroute using tunnels , 2007 .

[26]  Gábor Rétvári,et al.  Optimization methods for improving IP-level fast protection for local shared risk groups with Loop-Free Alternates , 2014, Telecommun. Syst..

[27]  Brighten Godfrey,et al.  More is less: reducing latency via redundancy , 2012, HotNets-XI.

[28]  Ibrahim Hokelek.  Loop-Free IP Fast Reroute Using Local and Remote LFAPs , 2008 .

[29]  Shi Qian,et al.  Evaluation of network resilience, survivability, and disruption tolerance: analysis, topology generation, simulation, and experimentation , 2013, Telecommun. Syst..

[30]  Spyridon Antonakopoulos,et al.  A simple IP fast reroute scheme for full coverage , 2012, 2012 IEEE 13th International Conference on High Performance Switching and Routing.

[31]  GjessingStein,et al.  Multiple routing configurations for fast IP network recovery , 2009 .

[32]  Stewart Bryant,et al.  Internet Engineering Task Force (ietf) a Framework for Ip and Mpls Fast Reroute Using Not-via Addresses , 2022 .

[33]  S. Gjessing,et al.  Multiple Routing Configurations for Fast IP Network Recovery , 2009, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[34]  Michael Menth,et al.  Loop-free alternates and not-via addresses: A proper combination for IP fast reroute? , 2010, Comput. Networks.

[35]  Mohammad S. Obaidat,et al.  Performance Evaluation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems , 1998, Simul..

[36]  M. Golumbic.  Algorithmic graph theory and perfect graphs , 1980 .

[37]  M. Golumbic.  Algorithmic Graph Theory and Perfect Graphs (Annals of Discrete Mathematics, Vol 57) , 2004 .

[38]  Farnam Jahanian,et al.  Internet routing instability , 1997, SIGCOMM '97.

[39]  Tanveer Fatima,et al.  Multiple Routing Configurations for Fast Ip Network Recovery - Using Selective Repeat Automatic-Repeat-Request , 2013 .

[40]  Athina Markopoulou,et al.  Characterization of failures in an IP backbone , 2004, IEEE INFOCOM 2004.

[41]  Gábor Rétvári,et al.  IP fast ReRoute: Loop Free Alternates revisited , 2011, 2011 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[42]  Matthew Roughan,et al.  The Internet Topology Zoo , 2011, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[43]  Chen-Nee Chuah,et al.  Analysis of link failures in an IP backbone , 2002, IMW '02.

[44]  Alia Atlas,et al.  Fast Reroute Extensions to RSVP-TE for LSP Tunnels , 2005, RFC.

[45]  Zhi-Li Zhang,et al.  On the Feasibility and Efficacy of Protection Routing in IP Networks , 2010, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[46]  Stein Gjessing,et al.  Multiple routing configurations for fast IP network recovery , 2009, IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw..

[47]  Tibor Cinkler,et al.  A Novel Loop-Free IP Fast Reroute Algorithm , 2007, EUNICE.