Performance analysis of multi-layered protection switching with control-forwarding separation

Fast fault restoration is essential in carrier-grade transport network for QoS-guaranteed service provisioning and efficient traffic engineering. The performances of multi-layered protection switching with control-forwarding separation, however, have not been studied in detail. In this paper, we propose a fast fault restoration in multi-layered network with Control-Forwarding separation. The proposed scheme leverages the merits of each layer, such as fast fault detection in WDM Optical layer, traffic engineering in MPLS layer, and hierarchical priority-based resource sharing in IP layer. The performances of the proposed fast fault restoration with control-forwarding separation are analyzed with a series of systematic tests. From the experiments, we found that the fault restoration time in IP/MPLS network with control-forwarding separation is less than 10 msec in a network with 9 forwarding elements in 3 × 3 mesh topology, while it takes around 90ms in a network with 256 nodes (16 × 16) mesh network. These results show that the multi-layered network with control-forwarding separation has scalability for carrier-grade QoS-guaranteed service provisioning.