Optimizing unique shortest paths for resilient routing and fast reroute in IP-based networks

Intradomain routing in IP networks follows shortest paths according to administrative link costs. When several equal-cost shortest paths exist, routers that use equal-cost multipath (ECMP) distribute the traffic over all of them. To produce single-shortest path (SSP) routing, a selection mechanism (tie-breaker) chooses just one of the equal-cost paths. Tie-breakers are poorly standardized and use information that may change over time, which makes SSP routing unpredictable. Therefore, link costs producing unique shortest paths (USP) are preferred. In this paper, we show that optimized SSP routing can lead to significantly higher link utilization than expected in case of non-deterministic tie-breakers. We investigate the impact of the allowed link cost range on the general availability of USP routing. We use a heuristic algorithm to generate link costs for USP routing and to minimize the maximum link utilization in networks with and without failures. Fast reroute (FRR) mechanisms can repair failures faster than conventional IP rerouting by pre-computing shortest backup paths around failed network elements. However, when multiple equal-cost paths exist, the backup path layout is unpredictable. We adapt our heuristic to optimize USP routing for IP-FRR using not-via addresses and MPLS-FRR with facility and one-to-one backup. Finally, we compare the performance of USP with various other routing schemes using realistic Rocket-fuel topologies.