Fast Recovery from Dual Link Failures in IP Networks

This paper develops a novel mechanism for recovering from dual link failures in IP networks. The highlight of the developed routing approach is that a node re-routes a packet around the failed link without the knowledge of the second link failure. The proposed technique requires three protection addresses for every node, in addition to the normal address. Associated with every protection address of a node is a protection graph. Each link connected to the node is removed in at least one of protection graphs and every protection graph is guaranteed to be two-edge connected. The network recovers from the first failure by tunneling the packet to the next-hop node using one of the protection addresses of the next-hop node; and the packet is routed over the protection graph corresponding to that protection address. We prove that it is sufficient to provide up to three protection addresses per node to tolerate any arbitrary two link failures in a three-edge connected graph. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed technique over several network topologies.