An Improvement of an IP Fast Reroute Method Using Multiple Routing Tables

Abstract

The demand for high Internet availability has increased. As a routing method to recover fast from a single network component (link or node) failure, a method using multiple routing tables has been proposed. In the method, when a component failure occurs, packets which are supposed to pass through the component in the failure free state are rerouted using a backup routing table (backup table: BT) which does not use the component. Thus, it is important to decrease the increased routing cost, and because the method uses multiple BTs, it is also important to decrease the numbers of entries in BTs. In this paper, we propose a new routing method to decrease the increased routing cost. In the conventional method, there are many components that do not fail but are not used for packet forwarding in a BT. In our proposed method, we use such components as much as possible to decrease the increased routing cost. About the decreasing of the numbers of entries in BTs, we simulate packet forwarding for every node-pair and find unnecessary entries which are not used in packet forwarding in any node-pair. Numerical examples show that our proposed method is superior to the conventional method.