Using Shared Risk Link Groups to enhance backup path computation

To cope quickly with all types of failure risks (link, node and Shared Risk Link Group (SRLG)), each router detecting a failure on an outgoing interface activates locally all the backup paths protecting the primary paths which traverse the failed interface. With the observation that upon a SRLG failure, some active backup paths are inoperative and do not really participate to the recovery (since they do not receive any traffic flow), we propose a new algorithm (SRLG structure exploitation algorithm or SSEA) exploiting the SRLG structures to enhance the admission control and improve the protection rate. With our algorithm, more flexibility is provided for the backup path selection since a backup path which protects against the failure of a link belonging to a SRLG does not systematically bypass all the links of that SRLG. Moreover, our algorithm permits to save more bandwidth because it does not allocate the bandwidth for the inoperative backup paths even if they are activated. Simulations show that our algorithm SSEA decreases the ratio of rejected backup paths and, it reduces in distributed environments the average number of messages sent to manage the bandwidth information necessary for the backup path computation. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.