A network connection protection mechanism based on random node identification

Network failures cause service disruption, loss of packets, long transition delay, etc. Both IP network and MPLS network, which are two classical network types today, due to their limitations of packet forwarding mechanisms, have difficulties in supporting fast network failure recovery. In this paper, we first introduce a new packet switching method and make a brief introduction of Vector Network (VN). Taking advantage of the multiple paths and source-routing-like properties of VN, we propose a network connection protection mechanism based on random node identification to achieve fast network failure restoration efficiently with minor cost. Unlike the conventional routing mechanisms that immediately start rerouting when detected failures, in our proposal, end systems maintain multiple paths to every destination. When one network failure occurs, routers adjacent to the failure flood the failure information to all end systems. Each end system firstly uses backup paths to restore its connections without starting rerouting immediately. Our mechanism can guarantee fast connection restoration with little interruptions of data transition. Due to the simplicity of our new proposed random node identification method that each node generates node identification (NI) in a specific range for itself, there is no extra cost for maintaining NI distribution and management. Both the theoretical analysis and experimental results show the efficiency of our mechanism.