A Cost-Effective Protection and Restoration Mechanism for Ethernet Based Networks: an Experiment Report

IEEE Workshop on High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR)

Phoenix, Arizona
April 2004

Abstract

Protection and restoration at the physical layer is fast, but may require dedicated hardware. On the other hand, IP, although it does not rely on specific topology, is slow. Protection based on MPLS is effective for rerouting traffic to a pre-established backup LSP in the case of failures. Failure detection plays a dominant role in protection and restoration. This research presents an approach for addressing MPLS lin k and node protection by making use of auto-negotiation for Ethernet. The method is efficient to detect failures in an Ethernet-based network and can be easily adopted to support MPLS protection with low overhead. The experiment results show that traffic recovery can be achieved in sub-30ms.

The full text of this article can be purchased through the IEEE here