Multiple Routing Configurations For Fast Ip Network Recovery

Abstract

As the Internet takes an increasingly central role in our communications infrastructure, the slow convergence of routing protocols after a network failure becomes a growing problem. To assure fast recovery from link and node failures in IP networks, we present a new recovery scheme called Multiple Routing Configurations (MRC). Our proposed scheme guarantees recovery in all single failure scenarios, using a single mechanism to handle both link and node failures, and without knowing the root cause of the failure. MRC is strictly connectionless, and assumes only destination based hop-by-hop forwarding. MRC is based on keeping additional routing information in the routers, and allows packet forwarding to continue on an alternative output link immediately after the detection of a failure. It can be implemented with only minor changes to existing solutions. In this