Fault-Tolerant Overlay Protocol Network

Shelly Nick, Jensen Nathan, Baird Leemon and Moore Jason

The 7th IEEE Information Assurance Workshop (IAWorkshop 2006)
West Point, New York, USA, June 21-23, 2006

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Abstract

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and other time critical communications require a level of availability much higher than the transport network supporting traditional data communications. These critical command and control channels must continue to operate and remain available in the presence of an attack or other network disruption. Even disruptions of short duration can severely damage, degrade, or drop a VoIP connection. Routing protocols in use today can dynamically adjust for a changing network topology. However, they generally cannot converge quickly enough to continue an existing voice connection. As packet switching technologies continue to erode traditional circuit switching applications,some methodology or protocol must be developed that can support these traditional requirements over a packet-based infrastructure. We propose one method of meeting these new requirements is through the use of a modi¯ed overlay tunneling network and associated routing protocols called the Fault Tolerant Overlay Protocol (FTOP) network. Because the network is entirely logical, the routing protocol may be greatly simplified. Since the network is entirely logical, (enncrypt the tunnels to form a basic VPN mesh), ensuring confidentiality and availability are much simpler. Empirical results show that where convergence time on the substrate network may be as high as six to ten minutes, the overlay network can converge in a fraction of a second, showing on average a two order of magnitude convergence time improvement, ensuring availability of critical network services in the face substrate network disruption whether caused by malicious attack or other failure

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