A cost-effective protection and restoration mechanism for Ethernet based networks: an experiment report

Protection and restoration at the physical layer is fast, but may require dedicated hardware. On the other hand, IP, although it does not rely on specific topology, is slow. Protection based on MPLS is effective for rerouting traffic to a pre-established backup LSP in the case of failures. Failure detection plays a dominant role in protection and restoration. This research presents an approach for addressing MPLS link and node protection by making use of auto-negotiation for Ethernet. The method is efficient in detecting failures in an Ethernet-based network and can be easily adopted to support MPLS protection with low overhead. The experimental results show that traffic recovery can be achieved in sub-30ms.