Integrated Load Balancing Approach for Fault Tolerance in MPLS Networks

Fault tolerance in Multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) networks has been actively researched for several years with the outcome of several algorithms. MPLS does fault tolerance by computing the alternate route either prior to the fault or upon occurrence of the fault. The former method is called protection switching and later is called rerouting. This paper addresses the problem of finding QoS paths for rerouting the traffic efficiently when the fault occurs. We use the concept of load balancing to redirect the traffic to the destination creating the Label Switched Paths on the fly by using the residue bandwidth of the intermediate links. Authors propose different ways to optimize the traffic paths in the network. These optimizations can be online or offline of which this paper concentrates on the online optimization. None of the load balancing formulation is suitable for networks for all degree of load so we propose an integrated solution which uses different algorithms depending on the network metrics such as load and capacity. Simulations suggest that the proposed algorithm is suitable in almost all traffic conditions.