IP fast rerouting for multi-link failures

The introduction of coherent optics and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) in telecommunication networks has led to unprecedented gains in backbone capacity. The increase in optical layer capacity inadvertently exacerbates the problem of traffic loss due to optical component failures. IP networks are designed over optical backbone networks, where each IP link traverses a multihop optical lightpath. Therefore, the failure of optical components often lead to multiple link failures in the IP network. In this paper, we develop an IP fast reroute mechanism using rooted arc-disjoint spanning trees that guarantees recovery from (k-1) link failures in a k-edge-connected network. As arc-disjoint spanning trees may be constructed in sub-quadratic time in the size of the network, our approach offers excellent scalability. Through experimental results, we show that employing arc-disjoint spanning trees to recover from multiple failures reduces path stretch in comparison with previously known techniques.