High Availability in the Future Internet

With the evolution of the Internet, a huge number of real-time applications, like Voice over IP, has started to use IP as primary transmission medium. These services require high availability, which is not amongst the main features of today’s heterogeneous Internet where failures occur frequently. Unfortunately, the primary fast resilience scheme implemented in IP routers, Loop-Free Alternates (LFA), usually does not provide full protection against failures. Consequently, there has been a growing interest in LFA-based network optimization methods, aimed at tuning some aspect of the underlying IP topology to maximize the ratio of failure cases covered by LFA. The main goal of this chapter is to give a comprehensive overview of LFA and survey the related LFA network optimization methods, pointing out that these optimization tools can turn LFA into an easy-to-deploy yet highly effective IP fast resilience scheme.