Components of MPLS Recovery Supporting Differentiated Resilience Requirements

With the growing commercial importance of the Internet and the development of new real-time, connection-oriented services like streaming technologies or IP-telephony, network resilience is becoming a key issue in the design of IP-based networks. Several IETF drafts and a framework proposal are discussed in the MPLS working group presenting different recovery mechanisms and strategies. This paper summarizes the current research efforts in the area of MPLS Recovery. The different recovery options are explained and the required MPLS components and open issues are discussed. Faced with multiple recovery options, an ISP or NSP must decide, which flows to protect to what degree against network failures. To this aim a signaling method is proposed which allows to signal the resilience requirements of individual services to the network, realizing an end-toend network resilience.