Communication Networks Efficiency of routing and resilience mechanisms in packet-switched communication networks

In this work we compare the efficiency of various routing and resilience mechanisms. Their path layout determines the utilization of links in the network under normal operation and in failure scenarios. For the comparison, the performance measure is the maximum utilization ρS of all links for a set of protected failures S. A routing mechanism is considered more efficient than another if it leads to a lower maximum link utilization ρS. We consider standard and optimized versions of IP routing and rerouting, optimized routing using explicit paths and end-to-end protection switching, as well as standard and optimized versions of MPLS fast reroute. The results show that routing optimization reduces the maximum link utilization significantly both with and without failure protection. The optimization potential for resilient routing is limited by the applied mechanism and depends heavily on the network structure and the set of protected failure scenarios S. Copyright c © 0000 AEIT