Towards Local Shortcutting of Fast Failover Routes.

As modern networks need to provide high availability and resilience, they commonly implement some form of Fast Failover Routing (FFR) in the data plane against link failures. However, FFR needs to find a balance between route quality and reaction times, where especially preinstalled failover rules struggle with lengthy detours to provide connectivity. To this end, we investigate a recently introduced theoretical paradigm, which removes transient routing detours by locally short-cutting them in the data plane–without the need for communication between the routers. Our contribution is two-fold: First, we provide an nftables implementation and show its performance gains regarding latency and throughput in Mininet. Second, we showcase the larger scale route lengths benefits of short-cutting routing detours, by running a Python-based evaluation on networks of up to 100 nodes.