Redirection based recovery for MPLS network systems

To provide a reliable backbone network, fault tolerance should be considered in the network design. For a multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) based backbone network, the fault-tolerant issue focuses on how to protect the traffic of a label switched paths (LSP) against node and link failures. In IETF, two well-known recovery mechanisms (protection switching and rerouting) have been proposed. To further enhance the fault-tolerant performance of the two recovery mechanisms, the proposed approach utilizes the failure-free LSPs to transmit the traffic of the failed LSP (the affected traffic). To avoid affecting the original traffic of each failure-free LSP, the proposed approach applies the solution of the minimum cost flow to determine the amount of affected traffic to be transmitted by each failure-free LSP. For transmitting the affected traffic along a failure-free working LSP, IP tunneling technique is used. We also propose a permission token scheme to solve the packet disorder problem. Finally, simulation experiments are performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.