Improved network resilience of wireless mesh networks using MPLS and Fast Re-Routing techniques

The performance of a wireless mesh network (WMN) can be significantly affected by node failures and medium-term time-varying phenomena in the wireless channel, which may lead to significant interruptions in packet delivery service. Because of their nature, WMNs are often deployed with an inherent degree of redundancy. In principle, this flexibility might be exploited to cope with the link failure problem by temporarily re-routing ongoing traffic on alternate paths. However, the existing routing protocols cannot be used for this purpose, since they either rely on link-state updates, which happen on a longer time scale than the phenomena under consideration, or the decisions are taken by the source node, which does not know the status on intermediate links. In this paper we present a Fast Re-Routing enabled architecture that is optimized for WMNs and allows nodes to react to local node or link failures by activating a pre-configured alternate path to reach a two-hop neighbor. The proposed scheme is enabled by label switching/stacking. Alternate paths are created automatically during the path setup phase via a lightweight protocol derived from LDP. The solution is proved to be effective through a testbed implementation. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.