A New Bit Repair Fast Reroute Mechanism for Smart Sensors IoT Network Infrastructure

Abstract

Today’s IP networks are experiencing a high increase in used and connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices and related deployed critical services. This puts increased demands on the reliability of underlayer transport networks. Therefore, modern networks must meet specific qualitative and quantitative parameters to satisfy customer service demands in line with the most common requirements of network fault tolerance and minimal packet loss. After a router or link failure within the transport network, the network convergence process begins. This process can take an unpredictable amount of time, usually depending on the size, the design of the network and the routing protocol used. Several solutions have been developed to address these issues, where one of which is the group of so-called Fast ReRoute (FRR) mechanisms. A general feature of these mechanisms is the fact that the resilience to network connectivity failures is addressed by calculating a pre-prepared alternative path. The path serves as a backup in the event of a network failure. This paper presents a new Bit Repair (B-REP) FRR mechanism that uses a special BIER header field (Bit-String) to explicitly indicate an alternative path used to route the packet. B-REP calculates an alternative path in advance as a majority of existing FRR solutions. The advantage of B-REP is the ability to define an alternative hop-by-hop path with full repair coverage throughout the network, where, unlike other solutions, we propose the use of a standardized solution for this purpose. The area of the B-REP application is communication networks working on the principle of packet switching, which use some link-state routing protocol. Therefore, B-REP can be successfully used in the IoT solutions especially in the field of ensuring communication from sensors in order to guarantee a minimum packet loss during data transmission.