A fast and scalable inter-domain MPLS protection mechanism

With the fast growth of Internet and a new widespread interest in optical networks, the unparalleled potential of MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS) is leading to further research and development efforts. One of those areas of research is Path Protection Mechanism. It is widely accepted that layer three protection and recovery mechanisms are too slow for today´s reliability requirements. Failure recovery latencies ranging from several seconds to minutes, for layer three routing protocols, have been widely reported. For this reason, a recovery mechanism at the MPLS layer capable of recovering from failed paths in 10´s of milliseconds has been sought. In light of this, several MPLS based protection mechanisms have been proposed, such as end-to-end path protection and local repair mechanism. Those mechanisms are designed for intra-domain recoveries and little or no attention has been given to the case of non-homogenous independent inter-domains. This paper presents a novel solution for the setup and maintenance of independent protection mechanisms within individual domains and merged at the domain boundaries. This innovative solution offers significant advantages including fast recovery across multiple non-homogeneous domains and high scalability. Detailed setup and operation procedures are described. Finally, simulation results using OPNET are presented showing recovery times of a few milliseconds.