Joint coverage and link utilization for fast IP local protection

To mitigate the impact of failures, many IP Fast Local Recovery (IPFLR) schemes have been proposed to reroute traffic in the events of failures. However, the existing IPFLR schemes either aimed to find the alternate backup routes to protect failures, or focused on balancing the traffic load routed on the backup routes. Furthermore, in Internet, flows are often managed by shortest path routing, and therefore purely determining the backup routing paths is not sufficient in protecting the error-prone networks. In this paper, we propose a Simulated Annealing based Load balancing and Protection (SALP) scheme to determine link weights for balancing link utilization in the non-failure state and simultaneously construct backup routing tables for protecting any single link failure in IP networks. In our proposed scheme, the two most significant issues, (1) load balancing and (2) coverage, are jointly considered to recover the network operation from single link failures. In the proposed scheme, upon a failure, only the nodes adjacent to a failure are activated to divert affected traffic to backup paths without disturbing regular traffic. Numerical results delineate that the proposed scheme achieves high coverage rate and load balancing at the expense of slightly increasing the entries of backup routing table.