Seamless Failure Recovery for Real-time Multimedia Applications in MPLS Networks

Abstract

The QoS provided by current best effort Internet is not good enough for real-time multimedia applications that are categorized as premium traffic. It is believed that QoS guarantees could be better provided by the connection oriented networks. Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is one such technology and these connection oriented networks are inherently more prone to network failures. Re-routing is a solution to cope with them. However, the re-routing always causes packet losses and results in service outage. Therefore, the QoS of the real-time premium traffic is highly degraded. The seamless failure recovery proposed in this paper can be used for real-time premium traffic that needs a guaranteed QoS. It applies an FEC technique to the conventional re-routing based path protection and seamlessly recovers the packet losses due to re-routing by way of an FEC recovery technique. The numerical and simulation results show that the proposed method can provide network architecture without service outage for real-time premium traffic while minimizing the service costs such as redundant traffic and additional buffer at edge routers.