Path protection with pre-identification for MPLS networks

Current approaches to providing robust network connections which are tolerant to failures involve restoration schemes which mainly focus on reserving backup paths. In this paper we propose a technique for which avoids the extra cost for reserving, by pre-identifying (but not reserving) the backup paths. We present and analyze an algorithm to solve this problem and study a practical special case in detail. Through simulations we show that our model is significantly more cost-efficient than backup path reservation. We also show how this model can fit into the MPLS architecture