Complexity of Perfect and Ideal Resilience Verification in Fast Re-Route Networks

TL;DR

This paper studies the computational complexity of verifying perfect and ideal resilience in fast re-routing networks, proving coNP-completeness in general but providing efficient algorithms under certain conditions.

Contribution

It establishes the coNP-completeness of verifying resilience in general networks and offers linear-time algorithms for specific scenarios where nodes lack in-port information.

Findings

Verifying perfect resilience is coNP-complete.

Verifying ideal resilience is coNP-complete.

Linear-time algorithms exist for scenarios without in-port information.

Abstract

To achieve fast recovery from link failures, most modern communication networks feature fully decentralized fast re-routing mechanisms. These re-routing mechanisms rely on pre-installed static re-routing rules at the nodes (the routers), which depend only on local failure information, namely on the failed links incident to the node. Ideally, a network is perfectly resilient: the re-routing rules ensure that packets are always successfully routed to their destinations as long as the source and the destination are still physically connected in the underlying network after the failures. Unfortunately, there are examples where achieving perfect resilience is not possible. Surprisingly, only very little is known about the algorithmic aspect of when and how perfect resilience can be achieved. We investigate the computational complexity of analyzing such local fast re-routing mechanisms. Our main result is a negative one: we show that even checking whether a given set of static re-routing rules ensures perfect resilience is coNP-complete. We also show coNP-completeness of the so-called ideal resilience, a weaker notion of resilience often considered in the literature. Additionally, we investigate other fundamental variations of the problem. In particular, we show that our coNP-completeness proof also applies to scenarios where the re-routing rules have specific patterns (known as skipping in the literature). On the positive side, for scenarios where nodes do not have information about the link from which a packet arrived (the so-called in-port), we present linear-time algorithms for both the verification and synthesis problem for perfect resilience.