Routing strategies for fault recovery in wide area packet networks

We present the results of a study of routing algorithms for traffic restoration after a failure in a virtual circuit packet switched wide area network. Standard routing algorithms based on minimizing the steady state network delay may not be appropriate for rerouting the calls after a failure, in view of the transient congestion. We propose alternative routing schemes to reduce the congestion. The results of a simulation study of a 10 node network comparing the performance of the different routing algorithms (i.e., minimum delay, minimum hop, load distribution on paths, load distribution on links) are presented.