Lancet: Better network resilience by designing for pruned failure sets

Yiyang Chang, Chuan Jiang, Ashish Chandra, Sanjay G. Rao, Mohit Tawarmalani

Abstract: Recently, researchers have started exploring the design of route protection schemes that ensure networks can sustain traffic demand without congestion under failures. Existing approaches focus on ensuring worst-case performance over simultaneous f-failure scenarios is acceptable. Unfortunately, even a single bad scenario may render the schemes unable to protect against any f-failure scenario. In this paper, we present Lancet, a system designed to handle most failures when not all can be tackled. Lancet comprises three components: (i) an algorithm to analyze which failure scenarios the network can intrinsically handle which provides a benchmark for any protection routing scheme, and guides the design of new schemes; (ii) an approach to efficiently design a protection schemes for more general failure sets than all f-failure scenarios; and (iii) techniques to determine which of combinatorially many scenarios to design for. Our evaluations with real topologies and validations on an emulation testbed show that Lancet outperforms a worst-case approach by protecting against many more scenarios, and can even match the scenarios handled by optimal network response.