Dynamic risk-aware routing for OSPF networks

Carrier networks are designed to provide high availability of communication services. Unfortunately, in case of failure, recovery mechanisms are getting involved only after a failure occurrence which cannot prevent a certain impact on traffic flows. However, there are often forewarning signs that a network device will stop working properly. Based on an embedded and real-time risk-level assessment, a proactive fault-management can be performed to isolate failing routers out of the routed topology, and thus totally avoid detrimental impact on the service availability. Our novel approach enables routers to preventively steer traffic away from risky paths by temporally tuning OSPF link cost. The consequences in terms of stability and availability are estimated based on an analytical model and then simulated to measure the expected benefits of the proposed proactive self-healing function. Finally, the functionality has been implemented in an experimental prototype in order to validate the proof of concept.