Efficiency of Routing and Resilience Mechanisms in Packet-Switched Networks.
Technical Report, 425. Department of Computer Science, (May 2007)Abstract
This paper compares the efficiency of different routing and
resilience mechanisms to avoid congestion in a network for a set of
protected failures. A routing mechanism is more efficient than another
one if it achieves a lower maximum link utilization in the same
networking scenario. With resilience requirements, the maximum link
utilization over the set of protected failure scenarios becomes the
critical value. We consider standard and optimized configurations of
single shortest path (SSP) and equal-cost multipath (ECMP) routing as
well as several types of end-to-end (e2e) path protection and MPLS fast
reroute (FRR). We investigate how well these resilience mechanisms can
cope with different network structures and with different sets of
protected failures. The results show that routing optimization reduces
the maximum link utilization significantly both with and without
protection of failures. The optimization potential for resilient
routing is limited by the applied mechanism and heavily depends on the
network structure and the set of protected failure scenarios.