Lancet: Better network resilience by designing for pruned failure sets

Abstract

Recently, researchers have started exploring the design of route protection schemes that ensure networks can sustain traffic demand without congestion under failures. Existing approaches focus on ensuring worst-case performance over simultaneous f-failure scenarios is acceptable. Unfortunately, even a single bad scenario may render the schemes unable to protect against any f-failure scenario. In this paper, we present Lancet, a system designed to handle most failures when not all can be tackled. Lancet comprises three components: (i) an algorithm to analyze which failure scenarios the network can intrinsically handle which provides a benchmark for any protection routing scheme, and guides the design of new schemes; (ii) an approach to efficiently design a protection schemes for more general failure sets than all f-failure scenarios; and (iii) techniques to determine which of combinatorially many scenarios to design for. Our evaluations with real topologies and validations on an emulation testbed show that Lancet outperforms a worst-case approach by protecting against many more scenarios, and can even match the scenarios handled by optimal network response.