Fast reroute from single link and single node failures for IP multicast

The rise in multicast implementations has seen with it an increased support for fast failure recovery from link and node failures. Most recovery mechanisms augment additional services to existing protocols causing excessive overhead, and these modifications are predominantly protocol-specific. In this paper, we develop a multicast failure recovery mechanism that constructs protocol independent fast reroute paths to recover from single link and single node failures. We observe that single link failure recovery in multicast networks is similar to recovering unicast traffic, and we use existing unicast recovery mechanisms for multicast traffic. We construct multicast protection trees that provide instantaneous failure recovery from single node failures. For a given node x, the multicast protection tree spans all its neighbors and does not include itself. Thus, when the node fails, the neighbors of the node are connected through the multicast protection tree instead of node x, and forward the traffic over the multicast protection tree for the duration of failure recovery. The multicast protection trees are constructed a priori, without the knowledge of the multicast traffic in the network. Based on simulations on three realistic network topologies, we observe that the multicast protection trees increase the routing table size only by 38% on average and the path length between any source–destination pair by 13% on average.