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IP MIB for IP Fast-Reroute draft-ietf-rtgwg-ipfrr-ip-mib-03 This draft defines a portion of the Management Information Base (MIB) for use with network management protocols in the Internet community. In particular, it describes managed objects relevant for IP routes using IP Fast-Reroute [RFC5714

IP Fast Reroute with Remote Loop-Free Alternates: the Unit Link Cost Case

Up to not so long ago, Loop-Free Alternates (LFA) was the only viable option for providing fast protection in pure IP and MPLS/LDP networks. Unfortunately, LFA cannot provide protection for all possible failure cases in general. Recently, the IETF has initiated the Remote Loop-Free Alternates (rLFA) technique, as a simple extension to LFA, to boost the fraction of failure cases covered by fast protection. Before further stan- dardization and deployment, however, it is crucial to determine to what extent rLFA can improve the level of protection in a general IP network, as well as to find optimization methods to tweak a network for 100% rLFA coverage. In this paper, we take the first steps towards this goal by solving these problems in the special, but practically relevant, case when each network link is of unit cost. We also provide preliminary numerical evaluations conducted on real IP network topologies, which suggest that rLFA significantly improves the level of protection, and most networks need only 2 − 3 new links to be added to attain 100% failure case coverage

Multi-Link Failure Effects on MPLS Resilient Fast-Reroute Network Architectures

© 2021 IEEE.MPLS has been in the forefront of high-speed Wide Area Networks (WANs), for almost two decades [1, 12]. The performance advantages in implementing Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) are mainly its superior speed based on fast label switching and its capability to perform Fast Reroute rapidly when failure(s) occur – in theory under 50 ms [16, 17], which makes MPLS also interesting for real-time applications. We investigate the aforementioned advantages of MPLS by creating two real testbeds using actual routers that commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use, one with a ring and one with a partial mesh architecture. In those two testbeds we compare the performance of MPLS channels versus normal routing, both using the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing protocol. The speed of the Fast Reroute mechanism for MPLS when failures are occurring is investigated. Firstly, baseline experiments are performed consisting of MPLS versus normal routing. Results are evaluated and compared using both single and dual failure scenarios within the two architectures. Our results confirm recovery times within 50 ms

Comparison of New Solutions in IP Fast Reroute

Currently, network requirements are placed on the efficiency and size of the networks. These conditions can be ensured by modern converged networks that integrate the functions of both data and telecommunication networks. Line or router failures have always been a part of transmission networks, which is no different from converged networks. As a result of outages, which can take from ms to tens of seconds, packets are lost. These outages cause degraded transmission quality, which is undesirable when transmitting real-time multimedia services (Voice over IP, video). To solve the mentioned problems, the IETF organization has developed IP Fast Reroute mechanisms to minimise the time to restore the connection after a line or node failure and, consequently, less packet loss. The article reviews and compares the latest IP Fast Reroute mechanisms deployed in the last three years. First, we have Optimistic Fast Rerouting, which calculates optimistic and fallback scenarios. The second is Post-processing Fast Reroute, which decomposes the network according to metrics such as load and route length. Third, Local Fast Reroute focused on low congestion and random access

Adaptive post-failure load balancing in fast reroute enabled IP networks

Fast reroute (FRR) techniques have been designed and standardised in recent years for supporting sub-50-millisecond failure recovery in operational ISP networks. On the other hand, if the provisioning of FRR protection paths does not take into account traffic engineering (TE) requirements, customer traffic may still get disrupted due to post-failure traffic congestion. Such a situation could be more severe in operational networks with highly dynamic traffic patterns. In this paper we propose a distributed technique that enables adaptive control of FRR protection paths against dynamic traffic conditions, resulting in self-optimisation in addition to the self-healing capability. Our approach is based on the Loop-free Alternates (LFA) mechanism that allows non-deterministic provisioning of protection paths. The idea is for repairing routers to periodically re-compute LFA alternative next-hops using a lightweight algorithm for achieving and maintaining optimised post-failure traffic distribution in dynamic network environments. Our experiments based on a real operational network topology and traffic traces across 24 hours have shown that such an approach is able to significantly enhance relevant network performance compared to both TE-agnostic and static TE-aware FRR solutions. © 2011 IEEE

Smart Sensor Technologies for IoT

The recent development in wireless networks and devices has led to novel services that will utilize wireless communication on a new level. Much effort and resources have been dedicated to establishing new communication networks that will support machine-to-machine communication and the Internet of Things (IoT). In these systems, various smart and sensory devices are deployed and connected, enabling large amounts of data to be streamed. Smart services represent new trends in mobile services, i.e., a completely new spectrum of context-aware, personalized, and intelligent services and applications. A variety of existing services utilize information about the position of the user or mobile device. The position of mobile devices is often achieved using the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) chips that are integrated into all modern mobile devices (smartphones). However, GNSS is not always a reliable source of position estimates due to multipath propagation and signal blockage. Moreover, integrating GNSS chips into all devices might have a negative impact on the battery life of future IoT applications. Therefore, alternative solutions to position estimation should be investigated and implemented in IoT applications. This Special Issue, “Smart Sensor Technologies for IoT” aims to report on some of the recent research efforts on this increasingly important topic. The twelve accepted papers in this issue cover various aspects of Smart Sensor Technologies for IoT

High Availability in the Future Internet

With the evolution of the Internet, a huge number of real- time applications, like Voice over IP, has started to use IP as primary transmission medium. These services require high availability, which is not amongst the main features of today’s heterogeneous Internet where fail- ures occur frequently. Unfortunately, the primary fast resilience scheme implemented in IP routers, Loop-Free Alternates (LFA), usually does not provide full protection against failures. Consequently, there has been a growing interest in LFA-based network optimization methods, aimed at tuning some aspect of the underlying IP topology to maximize the ratio of failure cases covered by LFA. The main goal of this chapter is to give a comprehensive overview of LFA and survey the related LFA network op- timization methods, pointing out that these optimization tools can turn LFA into an easy-to-deploy yet highly effective IP fast resilience scheme

Carrier grade resilience in geographically distributed software defined networks

The Internet is a fundamental infrastructure in modern life, supporting many different communication services. One of the most critical properties of the Internet is its ability to recover from failures, such as link or equipment failure. The goal of network resilience heavily influenced the design of the Internet, leading to the use of distributed routing protocols. While distributed algorithms largely solve the issue of network resilience, other concerns remain. A significant concern is network management, as it is a complex and error-prone process. In addition, network control logic is tightly integrated into the forwarding devices, making it difficult to upgrade the logic to introduce new features. Finally, the lack of a common control platform requires new network functions to provide their own solutions to common, but challenging, issues related to operating in a distributed environment. A new network architecture, software-defined networking (SDN), aims to alleviate many of these network challenges by introducing useful abstractions into the control plane. In an SDN architecture, control functions are implemented as network applications, and run in a logically centralized network operating system (NOS). The NOS provides the applications with abstractions for common functions, such as network discovery, installation of forwarding behaviour, and state distribution. Network management can be handled programmatically instead of manually, and new features can be introduced by simply updating or adding a control application in the NOS. Given proper design, an SDN architecture could improve the performance of reactive approaches to restoring traffic after a network failure. However, it has been shown in this dissertation that a reactive approach to traffic restoration will not meet the requirements of carrier grade networks, which require that traffic is redirected onto a back-up route less than 50 ms after the failure is detected. To achieve 50 ms recovery, a proactive approach must be used, where back-up rules are calculated and installed before a failure occurs. Several different protocols implement this proactive approach in traditional networks, and some work has also been done in the SDN space. However, current SDN solutions for fast recovery are not necessarily suitable for a carrier grade environment. This dissertation proposes a new failure recovery strategy for SDN, based on existing protocols used in traditional carrier grade networks. The use of segment routing allows for back-up routes to be encoded into the packet header when a failure occurs, without needing to inform other switches of the failure. Back-up routes follow the post-convergence path, meaning that they will not violate traffic engineering constraints on the network. An MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) data plane is used to ensure compatibility with current carrier networks, as MPLS is currently a common protocol in carrier networks. The proposed solution was implemented as a network application, on top of an open-source network operating system. A geographically distributed network testbed was used to verify the suitability for a geographically distributed carrier network. Proof of concept tests showed that the proposed solution provides complete protection for any single link, link aggregate or node failure in the network. In addition, communication latencies in the network do not influence the restoration time, as they do in reactive approaches. Finally, analysis of the back-up path metrics, such as back-up path lengths and number of labels required, showed that the application installed efficient back-up paths

Resilient and Scalable Forwarding for Software-Defined Networks with P4-Programmable Switches

Traditional networking devices support only fixed features and limited configurability. Network softwarization leverages programmable software and hardware platforms to remove those limitations. In this context the concept of programmable data planes allows directly to program the packet processing pipeline of networking devices and create custom control plane algorithms. This flexibility enables the design of novel networking mechanisms where the status quo struggles to meet high demands of next-generation networks like 5G, Internet of Things, cloud computing, and industry 4.0. P4 is the most popular technology to implement programmable data planes. However, programmable data planes, and in particular, the P4 technology, emerged only recently. Thus, P4 support for some well-established networking concepts is still lacking and several issues remain unsolved due to the different characteristics of programmable data planes in comparison to traditional networking. The research of this thesis focuses on two open issues of programmable data planes. First, it develops resilient and efficient forwarding mechanisms for the P4 data plane as there are no satisfying state of the art best practices yet. Second, it enables BIER in high-performance P4 data planes. BIER is a novel, scalable, and efficient transport mechanism for IP multicast traffic which has only very limited support of high-performance forwarding platforms yet. The main results of this thesis are published as 8 peer-reviewed and one post-publication peer-reviewed publication. The results cover the development of suitable resilience mechanisms for P4 data planes, the development and implementation of resilient BIER forwarding in P4, and the extensive evaluations of all developed and implemented mechanisms. Furthermore, the results contain a comprehensive P4 literature study. Two more peer-reviewed papers contain additional content that is not directly related to the main results. They implement congestion avoidance mechanisms in P4 and develop a scheduling concept to find cost-optimized load schedules based on day-ahead forecasts