A recent study characterizing failures in computer networks shows that transient single element (node link) failures are the dominant failures in large communication networks like the Internet. Thus, having the routing paths globally recomputed on a failure does not pay off since the failed element recovers fairly quickly, and the recomputed routing paths need to be discarded. In this paper, we present the first distributed algorithm that computes the alternate paths required by some "proactive recovery schemes" for handling transient failures. Our algorithm computes paths that avoid a failed node, and provides an alternate path to a particular destination from an upstream neighbor of the failed node. With minor modifications, we can have the algorithm compute alternate paths that avoid a failed link as well. To the best of our knowledge all previous algorithms proposed for computing alternate paths are centralized, and need complete information of the network graph as input to the algorithm.
Wang and Gao's Backup Route Aware Protocol (BRAP) @cite_12 also uses some precomputed backup routes in order to handle transient single link failures. One problem central to their solution asks for the availability of reverse paths at each node. However, they do not discuss the computation of these reverse paths. As we discuss later, the alternate paths that our algorithm computes qualify as the reverse paths required by the BRAP protocol of @cite_12 .
@cite_12
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Dealing with network failures effectively is a major operational challenge for Internet service providers. Commonly deployed link state routing protocols such as OSPF react to link failures through global (i.e., network-wide) link state advertisements and routing table recomputations, causing significant forwarding discontinuity after a failure. The drawback with these protocols is that they need to trade off routing stability and forwarding continuity. To improve failure resiliency without jeopardizing routing stability, we propose a proactive local rerouting based approach called failure insensitive routing (FIR). The proposed approach prepares for failures using interface-specific forwarding, and upon a failure, suppresses the link state advertisement and instead triggers local rerouting using a backwarding table. In this paper, we prove that when no more than one link failure notification is suppressed, FIR always finds a loop-free path to a destination if one such path exists. We also formally analyze routing stability and network availability under both proactive and reactive approaches, and show that FIR provides better stability and availability than OSPF. A reliable and scalable mechanism to provide protection against a link or node failure has additional requirements in the context of SDN and OpenFlow. Not only it has to minimize the load on the controller, but it must be able to react even when the controller is unreachable. In this paper we present a protection scheme based on precomputed backup paths and inspired by MPLS “crankback” routing, that guarantees instantaneous recovery times and aims at zero packet-loss after failure detection, regardless of controller reachability, even when OpenFlow's “fast-failover” feature cannot be used. The proposed mechanism is based on OpenState, an OpenFlow extension that allows a programmer to specify how forwarding rules should autonomously adapt in a stateful fashion, reducing the need to rely on remote controllers. We present the scheme as well as two different formulations for the computation of backup paths. Single node failures represent more than 85 of all node failures in the today's large communication networks such as the Internet. Also, these node failures are usually transient. Consequently, having the routing paths globally recomputed does not pay off since the failed nodes recover fairly quickly, and the recomputed routing paths need to be discarded. Instead, we develop algorithms and protocols for dealing with such transient single node failures by suppressing the failure (instead of advertising it across the network), and routing messages to the destination via alternate paths that do not use the failed node. We compare our solution to that of Ref. [11] wherein the authors have presented a "Failure Insensitive Routing" protocol as a proactive recovery scheme for handling transient node failures. We show that our algorithms are faster by an order of magnitude while our paths are equally good. We show via simulation results that our paths are usually within 15 of the optimal for randomly generated graph with 100-1000 nodes. For restoration in the case of single link failures in meshed networks several strategies can be considered: link restoration, path restoration and path restoration with link-disjunct route. In terms of spare capacity requirement path restoration is found to be most attractive. These results are obtained by using two general optimisation techniques (simulated annealing and integer linear programming). Both techniques have each their own features; their applicability depends on the size and type of the problem. Application to WDM fibre networks is discussed.