An efficient load balancing scheme in failure insensitive routing

Due to the advent of social networking services and other emerging applications, the Internet traffic is growing faster than ever. Thus, link or node failures in the Internet may generate a tremendous disaster to the services. To foster the fast recovery from the failures, various Fast Reroute schemes have been developed. Among them, Failure Insensitive Routing (FIR) is a simple and easy to implement scheme, which provides a guaranteed loop free routing when the number of link failures is not more than one. However, the backup paths of the FIR may generate high traffic load to the links close to the failure. In this paper, we introduce a new load balancing mechanism to FIR. For the load balancing objective, we try to minimize the maximum load among the links in the network. By reducing the maximum load, the network becomes less vulnerable to instant fluctuations of the network traffic. Through simulations,We show that our scheme reduces the maximum link utilization of FIR.