Joint design on load balancing and survivability for resilient IP networks

Natural or artificial disasters often network service interruptions as well as packet and revenue losses. To alleviate the impact of failures on IP networks, many IP Fast ReRoute (IPFRR) approaches have been presented. In tunnel-based IPFRR schemes, upon the occurrence of a link failure, the nodes adjacent to the failed link are activated to encapsulate and reroute the affected traffic to the endpoint along the shortest path. Once the endpoint receives the affected traffic, it decapsulates and delivers the packets to the original destination along the shortest path. These shortest paths are computed based on link weights. The goal of this paper is to determine a set of link weights in a tunnel-based IPFRR system to jointly consider the two most significant issues: (1) load balancing and (2) survivability, i.e., coverage. We first formulate this problem as a mixed integer programming (MIP). Due to the NP-hard property of the MIP, a Joint Load balancing and Coverage for Tunnel-based (JLCT) fault recovery heuristic is proposed to approximate the solution of the MIP. Numerical results delineate that the proposed scheme efficiently improves conventional tunnel-based approaches on the rate of fault recovery and effectively balance link utilizations in the non-failure state.