  Source-controlled routing has been proposed as a way to improve flexibility
of future network architectures, as well as simplifying the data plane.
However, if a packet specifies its path, this precludes fast local re-routing
within the network. We propose SlickPackets, a novel solution that allows
packets to slip around failures by specifying alternate paths in their headers,
in the form of compactly-encoded directed acyclic graphs. We show that this can
be accomplished with reasonably small packet headers for real network
topologies, and results in responsiveness to failures that is competitive with
past approaches that require much more state within the network. Our approach
thus enables fast failure response while preserving the benefits of
source-controlled routing.
