Self-healing routing: failure, modeling and analysis

Network failures occur frequently, and self-healing ability of existing routing protocols cannot guarantee fast route convergence under these failures without impacting packet forwarding. During routing convergence, network routes may be incorrect and even routing black holes and loops occur, which will result in extensive packet loss and thus influence network performance. To solve this problem, several improved routing solutions have been proposed. In this paper, we propose the concept and model of self-healing routing and analyze the key problems in current intra-domain and inter-domain self-healing routing protocols after briefly reviewing the characteristics of network failures. We classify the different self-healing solutions into two categories based on their design principles: routing restoration and routing protection, and systematically analyze these different typical solutions. Finally, we discuss several key issues in self-healing routing and propose a hybrid protection and restoration based routing scheme.