Fault Management in Functionally Distributed Transport Networking for Large Scale Networks

We propose a fault management method in functionally distributed transport networking that separates the control-plane processing part (control element, CE) from the forwarding-plane processing part (forwarding element, FE) of the router. In this architecture, one path-control process in the CE consolidates and processes the path computations and the path settings for multiple routers. This leads to reduction in the path-control complexity and efficient operation of large scale networks. On the other hand, if faults occur in a CE and the CE become unable to serve a routing function, all of the FEs controlled by the CE will be affected. Therefore, it is absolutely critical to ensure the high reliability of the CE in this architecture. The proposed method takes the redundant configuration of N+m CEs and switches from a fault CE to a standby CE. Additionally, we describe the operation of each component in the proposed method and evaluate its feasibility by using software implementation.