Autonomous recovery for link failure based on tie-sets in information networks

This study proposes an autonomous distributed control method for single link failure based on loops in a network. This method focuses on the concept of tie-sets defined by graph theory in order to divide a network into a string of logical loops. A tie-set denotes a set of links that constitutes a loop. If tie-sets are used as local management units, high-speed and stable fail-over can be realized by taking advantage of ring-based restoration. This paper first introduces the notion of tie-sets, and then describes the distributed algorithms for link failure. Experimental results comparing the proposed method with RSTP suggest that our method alleviates the influence of failure in terms of route switching points, adverse effect in communications, and recovery time with a modest increase in state information of a node.