Resilient routing layers for recovery in packet networks

Most existing methods for network recovery are often complex and seldom used by network administrators. In this paper we present a novel approach for global and local recovery named resilient routing layers (RRL). The method is supported by algorithms, but also simple enough for a network administrator to implement by hand for reasonably sized networks. The idea in our approach is that for each node in the network there is a topology subset called a "safe layer", which can handle any traffic affected by a fault in the node itself, or any of its links. We demonstrate that our approach performs well compared to other comparable methods in a wide range of different network topologies. Particularly, we demonstrate RRLs performance for what are assumed to be the weakest parameters for our method, i.e., backup-path lengths and state information overhead. We discuss implementation issues of RRL, and demonstrate its applicability to MPLS networks.