Directory Enabled Networks
A survey of active network research
IEEE Communications Magazine
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) involves the integration of label switching forwarding paradigm and network layer routing. In order to deliver reliable services, MPLS requires a set of operations to provide protection to the traffic carried on the Label Switched Paths (LSPs). The Label Switched Routers (LSRs) are required to support failure detection, failure notification, and protection mechanisms. The MPLS recovery approaches can be classified as local recovery or global recovery. In case of local recovery, the switch over to recovery path is performed by the LSR that is immediately upstream of the point of failure, whereas in case of global recovery, the switch over is performed by a pre-determined LSR known as Protection Switch LSR (PSL).The failure notification plays an important role in the global recovery approach, as the PSL has to be notified about the failure in order for the recovery procedure to be initiated. This paper proposes the use of a directory service as part of the global MPLS recovery framework. The proposed architecture enables fast and effective notification of MPLS LSP failures, which facilitates quick recovery to the backup LSPs. The proposed architecture also scales effectively to all LSPs affected by the failure and promotes improved utilization of network resources by greatly reducing the involvement of the LSRs in MPLS path protection and restoration. This paper also introduces the novel idea of performing fault detection and fault notification on the backup or recovery path, which is very crucial for providing reliable MPLS path protection.