Local Detection and Recovery from Multi-Failure Patterns in MPLS-TE Networks

MPLS Fast Reroute advocates local protection mechanisms to rapidly reroute traffic onto pre-computed and signaled bypass tunnels. When the network is subject to multiple element failures, it becomes challenging to handle all the possible failure scenarios, for they are more disruptive and may require many more bypass tunnels to be dealt with. The objective of this paper is to adapt the MPLS local recovery schemes to deal with multi-failure scenarios, while retaining as much as possible the simplicity and the fast failure detection feature of current (single failure) local recovery mechanisms. This objective is achieved by optimally grouping failure patterns into clusters and minimizing the overall additional network resources ¿ i.e., bypass tunnels and bidirectional forwarding detection sessions ¿ while yielding full recovery from such failure patterns.