RRR: Rapid Ring Recovery Submillisecond Decentralized Recovery for Ethernet Ring

Ethernet is the indisputable de facto technology for local area networks due to its simplicity, low cost, and wide-scale adoption. In recent times, Ethernet has entered new networking areas, such as Metro Area Network (MAN) and Industrial Area Network (IAN), where specialized protocols dominate the market. In addition to the well known advantages, Ethernet acts as the common platform to integrate multiple protocols. However, Ethernet falls short of the stringent resilience requirements mandated by applications in MEN and IAN, despite progress made by the community on additional standardization. We describe a new approach for swift failure detection and recovery in Ethernet ring topologies called Rapid Ring Recovery (RRR). RRR is based on the novel usage of multiple virtual rings. Our implementation augmenting an off-the-shelf Ethernet switch shows that RRR reconverges after a fault in 294 microseconds while sustaining the loss of only eight large frames at 95 percent traffic load.