Convergence enhancement within operator backbones for real-time applications
Abdelali Ala, Driss El Ouadghiri, Mohamed Essaaidi · 2010
Mpls/vpn backbones are widely used today by various operators in the world, the time it takes to recover after a failure inside an operator backbone is becoming a selective criterion for customers, especially for enterprises using time sensitive applications, for example: traditional telephony is widely migrating today to voip and a loss of more than 2 seconds during a conversation will affect signaling traffic and may cause the call to be dropped. In this paper we describe and analyze various factors that influence the convergence time, we try to characterize the convergence process by using a lab setup as representative as possible to an operator mpls/vpn backbone. We then generate various templates of traffic while making cuts and failures, and we measure their impact. This way we study, in depth, features that help to minimize interruption durations. As the global convergence time is an assembly of several factors including: link failure detection, IGP failure detection, LSP Generation, SPT Computation, RIB update, BGP updates, etc., our aim is to find the best combination of enhancements at each level to reach the result.