RPFP: IP Fast ReRoute with Providing Complete Protection and without Using Tunnels

In today's IP network, if a link or router fails, packets that traverse the failed link or router will be lost until the network re-converges even if there exists another path bypassing the failure. We call such a single failure a valid single failure. Therefore, the IETF published a framework, called IP Fast ReRoute (IPFRR), which aims to provide protection against such valid single failures before the network re-converges. Based on the IPFRR framework, a lot of methods have been proposed. One category of IPFRR methods is IP-tunnel-based. The IP-tunnel-based IPFRR methods impose extra cost, such as the encapsulation cost, on the traffic delivery. In this paper we focus on the other category of IPFRR methods, no-tunnel-based IPFRR methods, which do not impose any extra cost on the traffic delivery. However, the existing no-tunnel-based IPFRR methods cannot provide complete protection against all the valid single failures. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new kind of no-tunnel-based IPFRR method, named with RPFP, which can provide complete protection against all the valid single failures.