Backup Path Allocation Based on a Correlated Link Failure Probability Model in Overlay Networks

Communication reliability is a desired property in computer networks. One key technology to increase the reliability of a communication path is to provision a disjoint backup path. One of the main challenges in implementing this technique is that two paths that are disjoint at the IP or overlay layer may share the same physical links. As a result, although one may select a disjoint backup path at the overlay layer, one physical link failure may cause the failure of both the primary and the backup paths. This paper proposes a solution to address this problem. The main idea is to take into account the correlated link failure at the overlay layer.