Distributed resilient architecture for Ethernet networks

Abstract

The authors proposed an enhanced resilient Ethernet architecture that is based on multiple pre-established spanning trees to connect a set of edge nodes. Fast failover is achieved so that edge nodes switch to a non-affected tree after a link or node failure. A fast and robust procedure was also proposed for edge nodes to detect failures and notify other edge nodes. The other contribution of the paper is an algorithm that calculates multiple spanning trees for input topologies so that at least one tree provides connectivity after a node or a link failure. The algorithm provides minimal number of spanning trees to make input networks fault tolerant. The performance of the algorithm was tested via simulations.