Evaluation of impact of backbone outages in IP networks

Abstract

Nationwide IP networks typically include nodes in major cities and the following elements: customer equipment, access routers, backbone routers, peering routers, access links connecting customer equipment to access routers, access routers to backbone routers, and backbone links interconnecting backbone routers. The part of this network consisting of backbone routers and related interconnecting links is referred to as the "backbone". We develop a new approach for accurately computing the Availability measure of IP networks by directly simulating each type of backbone outage event and its impact on traffic loss. We use this approach to quantify availability improvement as a result of introducing various technological changes in the network such as IGP tuning, high availability router architecture, MPLS-TE and Fast Reroute. A situation, where operational backbone links do not have enough spare capacity to carry additional traffic during the outage time, is referred to as bandwidth loss. We concentrate on one unidirectional backbone link and derive asymptotic approximations for the expected bandwidth loss in the framework of generalized Erlang and Engset models when the total number of resource units and request arrival rates are proportionally large. Simulation results demonstrate good accuracy of the approximations.