Metro: An Efficient Traffic Fast Rerouting Scheme With Low Overhead

Failure is common instead of exception in large-scale networks. To provide high service quality to upper-layer applications, it is desired that a converged backup path can be rapidly launched when failure occurs. In this paper, we design an IP based Fast ReRouting (FRR) scheme called Metro, which can solve the traffic rerouting convergence problem after arbitrary single link/node failure with low stretch for the backup path. When failure occurs in the network, Metro first indicates all the network areas that would be affected by the failure, and then finds out a few bridge links to drain the traffic in the affected network area to the network area that is not affected by the failure. In this way, Metro does not configure tunnels, encapsulate or modify data packets, and hence it is easy to be deployed in current networks. Extensive simulations show that Metro can solve arbitrary single link/node failure with backup paths shorter than the state-of-the-art solutions, and about 98% of the backup path stretch in Metro are the same as the optimal tunnel scheme.