RPFP: IP fast reroute with providing complete protection and without using tunnels

In today's IP network, if a link or router fails, packets that traverse the failed link or router will be lost until the network re-converges even if there exists another path bypassing the failure. We call such a single failure a valid single failure. Therefore the IETF published a framework called IP Fast ReRoute (IPFRR) which aims to provide protection against such valid single failures before the network re-converges. Based on the IPFRR framework, a lot of methods have been proposed. One category of IPFRR methods is IP-tunnel-based. The IP-tunnel-based IPFRR methods impose extra cost such as the encapsulation cost, on the traffic delivery. In this paper we focus on the otber category of IPFRR methods, no-tunnel-based IPFRR methods, which do not impose any extra cost on the traffic delivery. However, the existing no-tunnel-based IPFRR methods cannot provide complete protection against all the valid single failures. Therefore in this paper we propose a new kind of no-tunnel-based IPERR method named with RPFP which can provide complete protection against all the valid single failures.