FAILURE NOTIFICATION IN A NETWORK HAVING SERIALLY CONNECTED NODES

摘要

Multicast capabilities of a link state protocol controlled network are us ed to accelerate the flooding advertisement of topology change notifications within portions of the network. This flooding mechanism may be particularly efficient in a network with a large number of two-connected nodes such as a ring network architecture. A control plane specific multicast group address is used when flooding topology change notifications, and a process such as reverse path forwarding check is used as an additional control on forwarding of the notification to prevent looping of control plane packets. Two-connec ted nodes insert a forwarding entry into their FIB to enable frames containi ng the control message to be forwarded via the data plane on to the downstre am node so that propagation of the control message along a chain of two-conn ected nodes may occur at data plane speeds.