Full Protection Made Easy: The DisPath IP Fast Reroute Scheme

This study presents a simple and efficient IP FRR scheme called DisPath, which leverages several fundamental properties of minimum-cost node-disjoint paths for determining the alternate next hop towards a given destination. We show that DisPath ensures full coverage, meaning protection against all single link or node failures, with low computational overhead and without the practical complications encountered by other schemes that offer the same level of protection. Our simulations on several realistic instances reveal that DisPath usually creates shorter (and, at worst, not much longer) alternative paths than existing solutions adopted by the industry. Combined with the aforementioned protection guarantee and simplicity of implementation, these results provide strong evidence that DisPath is a most compelling choice of IP FRR scheme