  A reliable network infrastructure must be able to sustain traffic flows, even
when a failure occurs and changes the network topology. During the occurrence
of a failure, routing protocols, like OSPF, take from hundreds of milliseconds
to various seconds in order to converge. During this convergence period,
packets might traverse a longer path or even a loop. An even worse transient
behaviour is that packets are dropped even though destinations are reachable.
In this context, this paper describes a proactive fast rerouting approach,
named Fast Emergency Paths Schema (FEP-S), to overcome problems originating
from transient link failures in OSPF routing. Extensive experiments were done
using several network topologies with different dimensionality degrees. Results
show that the recovery paths, obtained by FEPS, are shorter than those from
other rerouting approaches and can improve the network reliability by reducing
the packet loss rate during the routing protocols convergence caused by a
failure.
