An extended fault-tolerant link-state routing protocol in the Internet

Link-state routing protocols, such as OSPF and IS-IS, are widely used in the Internet today. In link-state routing protocols, global network topology information is first collected at each node. A shortest path tree (SPT) is then constructed by applying Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm at each node. Link-state protocols usually require the flooding of new information to the entire (sub)network after changes in any link state (including link faults). Narvaez et al. proposed a fault-tolerant link-state routing protocol without flooding. The idea is to construct a shortest restoration path for each unidirectional link fault. Faulty link information is distributed only to the nodes in the restoration path and only one restoration path is constructed. It is shown that this approach is loop-free. However, the Narvaez et al. approach is inefficient when a link failure is bidirectional because a restoration path is unidirectional and routing tables of nodes in the path are partially updated. In addition, two restoration paths may be generated for each bidirectional link fault. In this paper, we extend the Narvaez et al. protocol to efficiently handle a bidirectional link fault by making the restoration path bidirectional. Several desirable properties of the proposed extended routing protocol are also explored. A simulation study is conducted to compare the traditional link-state protocol, the source-tree protocol, the Narvaez et al. unidirectional restoration path protocol, and the proposed bidirectional restoration path protocol.