Session 1B: Data Mining and Management

Multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) has become an attractive technology for the next generation backbone networks. To provide high quality services, fault tolerance should be taken into account in the design of a backbone network. In an MPLS based backbone network, the fault-tolerant issue concerns how to protect traffic in a carried path (label switched path (LSP)) against node and link failures. This paper presents a new efficient fault-tolerant approach for MPLS. When a node or link failure occurs in a working LSP, the traffic of the faulty LSP (the affected traffic) is distributed to be carried by other failure-free working LSPs. To minimize the affections on the failure-free LSPs, the affected traffic distribution is transferred to the minimum cost flow to be solved. Finally, extensive simulations are performed to quantify the effectiveness of the proposed approach over previous approaches.