Local Restoration in Metro Ethernet Networks for Multiple Link Failures

Abstract

Ethernet a popular choice for metropolitan-area networks (MAN) due to simplicity, cost effectiveness and scalability. The Spanning-Tree based switching mechanism, which is considered to be very efficient at avoiding switching loops in LAN environment, is a performance bottleneck in Metro network context. Handling of link failure is an important issue in metro Ethernet networks. A link failure may result in serious service disruptions. A local restoration method for metro Ethernet with multiple spanning trees, which aims at fast handling of single link failures in a distributed manner, have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we propose a local restoration mechanism that uses MULTILINK algorithm for solving multiple link failures