Efficient Distributed Bandwidth Management for MPLS Fast Reroute

As service providers move more applications to their IP/MPLS (multiple protocol label switching ) backbone networks, rapid restoration upon failure becomes more and more crucial. Recently MPLS fast reroute has attracted lots of attention as it was designed to meet the needs of real-time applications, such as voice over IP. MPLS fast reroute achieves rapid restoration by computing and signaling backup label switched path (LSP) tunnels in advance and re-directing traffic as close to failure point as possible. To provide a guarantee of bandwidth protection, extra bandwidth has to be reserved on backup paths. Using path merging technique as described in IETF RFC 4090 only, the network is able to share some bandwidth on common links among backup paths of the same service LSP, i.e., so-called intra-sharing. But no solution is provided on how to share bandwidth among backup paths of different service LSPs, i.e., so-called inter-sharing. In this paper, we provide an efficient distributed bandwidth management solution. This solution allows bandwidth sharing among backup paths of the same and different service LSPs, i.e., both intra-sharing and inter-sharing, with a guarantee of bandwidth protection for any single node/link failure. We also propose an efficient algorithm for backup path selection with the associated signaling extensions for additional information distribution and collection. To evaluate our schemes, we compare them via simulation with the basic MPLS fast reroute proposal, IETF RFC 4090, on two networks. Our simulation results show that using our bandwidth management scheme can significantly reduce restoration overbuild from about 250% to about 100%, and our optimized backup path selection can further reduce restoration overbuild to about 60%.