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On providing fast protection with remote loop-free alternates

Analyzing and Optimizing Unit Cost Networks

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Abstract

Up to not so long ago, loop-free alternates (LFA) was the only viable option for providing fast protection in pure IP and MultiProtocol Label Switching–Label Distribution Protocol networks. Unfortunately, LFA cannot provide protection for all possible failure cases in general. Recently, the Internet Engineering Task Force has initiated the remote loop-free alternates (rLFA) technique as a simple extension to LFA, to boost the fraction of failure cases covered by fast protection. Before further standardization and deployment, however, it is crucial to determine to what extent rLFA can improve the level of protection against single link or node failures in a general IP network, as well as to find optimization methods to tweak a network for 100 % rLFA coverage. In this paper, we take the first steps towards this goal by solving these problems in the special, but practically relevant, case when each network link is of unit cost. We also provide preliminary numerical evaluations conducted on real IP network topologies, which suggest that rLFA significantly improves the level of protection, and most networks need only 2–3 new links to be added to attain 100 % failure case coverage irrespectively of whether link or node protection is considered.

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Notes

  1. In IP routing, the next router along the shortest path to a destination is called next-hop.

  2. In computer networking, the maximum transmission unit (MTU) is the size of the largest protocol data unit that the layer can pass onwards.

  3. The triangle inequality states that for any triangle, the sum of the lengths of any two sides must be greater than or equal to the length of the remaining side. It is one of the defining properties of the distance function, which is used in shortest path routing.

  4. See the remote-lfa maximum-cost option on [11].

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the support of High Speed Networks Laboratory at BME. This project was supported by TÁMOP 4.2.2.B-10/1-2010-0009 and OTKA-PD 104939 grants. Levente Csikor was supported by the hungarian Sándor Csibi Research Grant.

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  1. MTA-BME Future Internet Research Group, High Speed Networks Laboratory, Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Magyar tudósok körútja 2., Budapest, 1117, Hungary

    Levente Csikor & Gábor Rétvári

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  1. Levente Csikor
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Correspondence to Levente Csikor.

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Csikor, L., Rétvári, G. On providing fast protection with remote loop-free alternates. Telecommun Syst 60, 485–502 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11235-015-0006-9

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