New addressing scheme to increase reliability in MPLS with network coding

In this paper we investigate the implementation issues of some recent research concepts to improve the flexibility and reliability of backbone networks to support future services. In particular, we are interested in the application of general dedicated protection (GDP) that has been proved to be a viable protection method in backbone networks. The GDP approach enables instantaneous failure recovery to the widest range of failure scenarios, provides extremely high connection availability even in sparse network topologies, while it is optimal in bandwidth requirement among all dedicated protection approaches. First, in order to reach optimal bandwidth allocation of GDP we adopt network coding in circuit switched backbone networks with special focus to the case when bit level XOR operation is allowed over the packet at the network nodes. We believe, addressing is one of the key challenges in implementing the proposed GDP architecture with network coding. As a solution, we show how to adopt some state-of-the-art stateless addressing at the Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) layer developed for multicast addressing such as Bloom-filters and balanced parenthesis. Extensive simulations are conducted to verify the advantages of the proposed architecture in terms of bandwidth consumption and packet header length.