Metro: An Efficient Traffic Fast Rerouting Scheme With Low Overhead

Failure is common instead of exception in large-scale networks. To provide high service quality to upper-layer applications, it is desired that a converged backup path can be rapidly launched when failure occurs. In this paper, we design an IP based Fast ReRouting (FRR) scheme called Metro, which can solve the traffic rerouting convergence problem after arbitrary single link/node failure with low stretch for the backup path. When failure occurs in the network, Metro first indicates all the network areas that would be affected by the failure, and then finds out a few bridge links to drain the traffic in the affected network area to the network area that is not affected by the failure. In this way, Metro does not configure tunnels, encapsulate or modify data packets, and hence it is easy to be deployed in current networks. Extensive simulations show that Metro can solve arbitrary single link/node failure with backup paths shorter than the state-of-the-art solutions, and about 98% of the backup path stretch in Metro are the same as the optimal tunnel scheme.

I. Introduction

Networks, either an ISP network or a data center network, suffer from unpredictable failures. When the failures occur, one or more network components, such as nodes and links, cannot deliver the traffic, which results in a large amount of traffic loss [1], [2]. Furthermore, such traffic loss may bring large response latency to the applications running on the top of the network. Since many applications in current networks are delay sensitive, this large response latency may greatly degrade the application performance and user experience. Accordingly, a Fast ReRouting (FRR) scheme is required to rapidly recover the traffic delivery after network failure occurs. To minimize the recovery duration, in this work, we focus on the scheme to pre-compute the rerouting paths to deal with the network failure.