Mitigating transient loops through interface-specific forwarding

Under link-state routing protocols such as OSPF and IS-IS, when there is a change in the topology, propagation of link-state advertisements, path recomputation, and updating of forwarding tables (FIBs) will all incur some delay before traffic forwarding can resume on alternate paths. During this convergence period, routers may have inconsistent views of the network, resulting in transient forwarding loops. Previous remedies proposed to address this issue enforce a certain order among the nodes in which they update their FIBs. While such approaches succeed in avoiding transient loops, they incur additional message overhead and/or increased convergence delay. We explore an alternative approach, loopless interface-specific forwarding (LISF), that mitigates transient loops by forwarding a packet based on both its incoming interface and destination address. LISF needs to compute and update interface-specific instead of interface-independent forwarding tables. But it requires neither the synchronization of FIB updates at different nodes nor the modification of the existing link-state routing mechanisms. LISF is easily deployable with current routers if they already maintain a FIB at each interface for lookup efficiency. This paper presents the LISF approach, illustrates its strengths and limitations, discusses four alternative implementations of it and evaluates their performance.