Seamless Failure Recovery for Real-time Premium Traffic in MPLS Networks

Abstract

Real-time traffic will be a predominant traffic type in the next generation networks and 100% reliability and availability of networks will be required by real-time premium traffic (PT). It is believed that QoS guarantees could be better provided by the connection oriented networks such as Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS). These connection oriented networks are more vulnerable to network failures. Conventional path protections perform re-routing to cope with them. However, re-routing always causes packet losses and results in service outage. These losses are bursty in nature and highly degrade QoS of the real-time premium traffic. The novel path protection proposed in this paper recovers the bursty packet losses due to re-routing using forward error correction (FEC) path. Therefore, it can provide the network architecture with no service outage for such traffic. The numerical results show that the proposed method can achieve a very high availability for the real-time premium traffic in future IP/MPLS networks. routing (4). However, the problem of re-routing mentioned above still exists, and therefore it is necessary to find proactive techniques to recover the bursty packet losses due to re- routings. The novel idea of path protection with forward error correction (FEC) path proposed in this article can be used for real time premium traffic that needs a guaranteed QoS. It combines a FEC path with conventional path protection methods using re-routings and recovers the packet losses due to re-routings by way of a FEC recovery technique. The numerical result shows that this is a promising proactive technique to provide a guaranteed QoS for real time premium traffic that otherwise can lead to severe effects if 100% availability is not achieved. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In the next section, the problem description and the existing solutions are analyzed briefly. In Section III, we discuss the proposed method in detail. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated and the results are presented in Section IV. Finally this paper is concluded in Section V.