Achieving Best-path Selection at Line Rate through the SRv6 Live-Live Behavior

The network programming model of the Segment Routing (SRv6) architecture offers the possibility to define new functions aiming at improving the network performance. In this paper we introduce SRv6 Live-Live, a new behavior for the SRv6 data plane. SRv6 Live-Live is based on two primitives: i) traffic duplication, performed at the ingress node, and ii) the traffic de-duplication, executed at the egress node. The proposed behavior is suitable for the service provisioning of traffic flows having stringent requirements in terms of reliability, low delay and high throughput. Our preliminary performance evaluation, conducted in an emulated environment and realized by using a prototype implementation based on P4, shows that SRv6 Live-Live enhances the performance of the selected traffic flows in challenging network scenarios, characterized by high level of packet corruption/loss and large values of bandwidth-delay products.