R3

Abstract

Network resiliency is crucial to IP network operations. Existing techniques to recover from one or a series of failures do not offer performance predictability and may cause serious congestion. In this paper, we propose Resilient Routing Reconfiguration (R3), a novel routing protection scheme that is (i) provably congestion-free under a large number of failure scenarios; (ii) efficient by having low router processing overhead and memory requirements; (iii) flexible in accommodating different performance requirements (e.g., handling realistic failure scenarios, prioritized traffic, and the trade-off between performance and resilience); and (iv) robust to both topology failures and traffic variations. We implement R3 on Linux using a simple extension of MPLS, called MPLS-ff. We then conduct extensive Emulab experiments and simulations using realistic network topologies and traffic demands. Our results show that R3 achieves near-optimal performance and is at least 50% better than the existing schemes under a wide range of failure scenarios.