An efficient path recovery mechanism for LDP in MPLS Networks

The Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) network has been more and more widely used in backbone network since it has several merits such as high transmitting rate, low latency and high fault tolerance ability, etc. The major concept of MPLS network uses the Label Switch Path (LSP) technique that provides high performance in packet delivery without routing table lookup. Nevertheless, it needs more overhead to rebuild a new path when occurring link failure in MPLS network. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has proposed two recovery mechanisms, which are protection switching model and rerouting model to protect the LSP in MPLS network. However, these recovery mechanisms do not switch the working path to backup path efficiently and may lead the degradation of network performance due to long delay of path recovery. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an efficient path recovery mechanism, which employs the Diffusing Update Algorithm (DUAL) to establish the working path and the backup path concurrently and modify the Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) to establish the LSP by using routing table of Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP).