Evaluating and improving the performance of RSVP-TE graceful restart

GMPLS is viewed as an attractive intelligent control plane for different network technologies and graceful restart is a key technique in ensuring this control plane is resilient and able to recover adequately from faults. This paper studies the graceful restart mechanism recently proposed for a key GMPLS protocol, RSVP-TE. The performance of RSVP-TE graceful restart is evaluated in a variety of scenarios, with the impact of factors such as the number of data plane connections, the degree of the restarting node and the manner in which recovery messages are sent explored. The results obtained give significant insight into the behaviour and performance of RSVP-TE graceful restart and the findings are leveraged to propose techniques and guidelines to improve the performance of RSVP-TE graceful restart.