Fast Recovery From Link Failures in Ethernet Networks

Fast-recovery from link failures is a well-studied topic in IP networks. Employing fast-recovery in Ethernet networks is complicated as the forwarding is based on destination MAC addresses, which do not have the hierarchical nature similar to those exhibited in Layer 3 in the form of IP-prefixes. Moreover, switches employ backward learning to populate the forwarding table entries. Thus, any fast recovery mechanism in Ethernet networks must be based on undirected spanning trees if backward learning is to be retained. In this paper, we develop three alternatives for achieving fast recovery from single link failures in Ethernet networks. All three approaches provide guaranteed recovery from single link failures. The approaches differ in the technologies required for achieving fast recovery, namely VLAN rewrite or mac-in-mac encapsulation or both. We study the performance of the approaches developed on five different networks.