Fault-tolerant convergence routing

This paper presents fault-tolerant protocols for fast packet switch networks with convergence routing. The objective is to provide, after a link or a node (switch) failure, fast reconfiguration and continuous host-to-host communication. Convergence routing is a variant of deflection routing, which combines in a dynamic fashion, the on-line routing decision with the traffic load inside the network. Unlike other deflection techniques, convergence routing guarantees that packets will reach or converge to their destinations. This fault-tolerant solution is designed for a switch-based (i.e., arbitrary topology) LAN architecture called MetaNet. The original MetaNet´s convergence routing scheme has been modified in order to facilitate the property that the packet header need not be recomputed after a failure and/or a reconfiguration. This is achieved by having, at the network interface, a translator that maps the unique destination address to a virtual address. The virtual addresses are stored at the packet header, and used for convergence routing, with a global sense of direction over (i) a single spanning tree, and (ii) over two edge-disjoint spanning trees, for redundancy (fault tolerance) and greater efficiency