Gábor Rétvári

IP fast ReRoute: Loop Free Alternates revisited

IP Fast ReRoute (IPFRR) is the IETF standard for providing fast failure protection in IP and MPLS/LDP networks and Loop Free Alternates (LFA) is a basic specification for implementing it. Even though LFA is simple and unobtrusive, it has a significant drawback: it does not guarantee protection for all possible failure cases. Consequently, many IPFRR proposals have appeared lately, promising full failure coverage at the price of added complexity and non-trivial modifications to IP hardware and software. Meanwhile, LFA remains the only commercially available, and therefore, the only deployable IPFRR solution. Deployment, however, crucially depends on the extent to which LFA can protect failures in operational networks. In this paper, therefore, we revisit LFA in order to give theoretical insights and practical hints to LFA failure coverage analysis. First, we identify the topological properties a network must possess to profit from good failure coverage. Then, we study how coverage varies as new links are added to a network, we show how to do this optimally and, through extensive simulations, we arrive to the conclusion that cleverly adding just a couple of new links can improve the quality of LFA protection drastically.

IP Fast ReRoute: Lightweight Not-Via without Additional Addresses

In order for IP to become a full-fledged carrier- grade transport technology, a native IP failure-recovery scheme is necessary that can correct failures in the order of milliseconds. IP fast reroute (IPFRR) intends to fill this gap, providing fast, local and proactive handling of failures right in the IP layer. Building on experiences and extensive measurement results collected with a prototype implementation of the prevailing IPFRR technique, Not-via, in this paper we identify high address management burden and computational complexity as the major causes of why commercial IPFRR deployment still lags behind, and we present a lightweight not-via scheme, which, according to our measurements, improves these issues.

On shortest path representation

Lately, it has been proposed to use shortest path first routing to implement Traffic Engineering in IP networks. The idea is to set the link weights so that the shortest paths, and the traffic thereof, follow the paths designated by the operator. Clearly, only certain shortest path representable path sets can be used in this setting, that is, paths which become shortest paths over some appropriately chosen positive, integer-valued link weights. Our main objective in this paper is to distill and unify the theory of shortest path representability under the umbrella of a novel flow-theoretic framework. In the first part of the paper, we introduce our framework and state a descriptive necessary and sufficient condition to characterize shortest path representable paths. Unfortunately, traditional methods to calculate the corresponding link weights usually produce a bunch of superfluous shortest paths, often leading to congestion along the unconsidered paths. Thus, the second part of the paper is devoted to reducing the number of paths in a representation to the bare minimum. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that an algorithm is proposed, which is not only able to find a minimal representation in polynomial time, but also assures link weight integrality. Moreover, we give a necessary and sufficient condition to the existence of a one-to-one mapping between a path set and its shortest path representation. However, as revealed by our simulation studies, this condition seems overly restrictive and instead, minimal representations prove much more beneficial.

Practical OSPF traffic engineering

Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) traffic engineering (TE) is intended to bring long-awaited traffic management capabilities into IP networks, which still rely on todays prevailing routing protocols: OSPF or IS-IS. In OSPF, traffic is forwarded along, and split equally between, equal cost shortest paths. In this letter, we formulate the basic requirements placed on a practical TE architecture built on top of OSPF and present a theoretical framework meeting these requirements of practicality. The main contribution of our work comes from the recognition that coupled with an instance of the maximum throughput problem there exists a related inverse shortest-path problem yielding optimal OSPF link weights.

Converging the Evolution of Router Architectures and IP Networks

Although IP is widely recognized as the platform for next-generation converged networks, unfortunately, it is heavily burdened by its heritage of almost 30 years. Nowadays, network operators must devote significant resources to perform essential tasks, such as traffic engineering, policy enforcement, and security. In this article, we argue that one of the principal reasons for this is the way control and forwarding planes are interspersed in IP networks today. We review the architectural developments that led to the current situation, and we reason that centralization of network control functionality can constitute a solution to the pressing problems of the contemporary Internet.

Navigable networks as Nash equilibria of navigation games

Common sense suggests that networks are not random mazes of purposeless connections, but that these connections are organized so that networks can perform their functions well. One function common to many networks is targeted transport or navigation. Here, using game theory, we show that minimalistic networks designed to maximize the navigation efficiency at minimal cost share basic structural properties with real networks. These idealistic networks are Nash equilibria of a network construction game whose purpose is to find an optimal trade-off between the network cost and navigability. We show that these skeletons are present in the Internet, metabolic, English word, US airport, Hungarian road networks, and in a structural network of the human brain. The knowledge of these skeletons allows one to identify the minimal number of edges, by altering which one can efficiently improve or paralyse navigation in the network.

A precomputation scheme for minimum interference routing: the least-critical-path-first algorithm

This paper focuses on the selection of bandwidth-guaranteed channels for communication sessions that require it. The basic idea comes from minimum interference routing: select a feasible path that puts the least possible restriction on the available transmission capacity of other communicating parties. This is achieved by circumventing some critical bottleneck links. The main contribution of the paper is a novel characterization of link criticality, the criticality threshold, which can be readily precompiled for routing dozens of subsequent calls. Based on this finding we define a generic precomputation framework for minimum interference routing, the least-critical-path-first routing algorithm. We show by means of extensive simulations that efficient route precomputation is possible even in the case, when accurate resource availability information is not immediately available.

A novel loop-free IP fast reroute algorithm

Although providing reliable network services is getting more and more important, currently used methods in IP networks are typically reactive and error correcting can take a long time. One of the most interesting solutions is interface based fast rerouting, where not only the destination address but also the incoming interface is taken into account during the forwarding. Unfortunately, current methods can not handle all the possible situations as they are prone to form loops and make parts of the network with no failure unavailable. In this paper we propose a new interface based routing method, which always avoids loops for the price of a bit longer paths. We also present extensive simulation results to compare current and proposed algorithms.

OSPF for Implementing Self-adaptive Routing in Autonomic Networks: A Case Study

Autonomicity, realized through control-loop structures operating within network devices and the network as a whole, is an enabler for advanced and enriched self-manageability of network devices and networks. In this paper, we argue that the degree of self-management and self-adaptation embedded by design into existing protocols needs to be well understood before one can enhance or integrate such protocols into self-managing network architectures that exhibit more advanced autonomic behaviors. We justify this claim through an illustrative case study: we show that the well-known and extensively used intra-domain IP routing protocol, OSPF, is itself a quite capable self-managing entity, complete with all the basic components of an autonomic networking element like embedded control-loops, decision-making modules, distributed knowledge repositories, etc. We describe these components in detail, concentrating on the numerous control-loops inherent to OSPF, and discuss how some of the control-loops can be enriched with external decision making logics to implement a truly self-adapting routing functionality.

Optimizing IGP link costs for improving IP-level resilience

Recently, major vendors have introduced new router platforms to the market that support fast IP-level failure protection out of the box. The implementations are based on the IP Fast ReRoute-Loop Free Alternates (LFA) standard. LFA is simple, unobtrusive, and easily deployable. This simplicity, however, comes at a severe price, in that LFA usually cannot protect all possible failure scenarios. In this paper, we give new graph theoretical tools for analyzing LFA failure case coverage and we seek ways for improvement. In particular, we investigate how to optimize IGP link costs to maximize the number of protected failure scenarios, we show that this problem is NP-complete even in a very restricted formulation, and we give exact and approximate algorithms to solve it. Our simulation studies show that a deliberate selection of IGP costs can bring many networks close to complete LFA-based protection.