Creating high-speed internet lane for emergency situations

To solve this problem, Shenoy, along with co-principal investigator Erik Golen, a visiting assistant professor in RIT’s Information Sciences and Technologies Department, and a team of five graduate students created the Multi Node Label Routing (MNLR) protocol. It is designed with an immediate failover mechanism—meaning that if a link or node fails, it uses an alternate path right away, as soon as the failure is detected. The new protocol runs below the existing internet protocols, allowing normal internet traffic to run without disruption.

The new protocol does not depend on routes discovered by either Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Open Shortest Path First (OSPF). It discovers routes based on the labels assigned to the routers. The labels in turn carry the structural and relational connectivity information among routers.

“The new protocol is actually of very low complexity compared to the current routing protocols, including BGP and OSPF,” Shenoy said. “This is because the labels and protocols leverage the connectivity relationship that exists among routers, which are already sitting on a nice structure.”

In a demo this May, the team put the protocol to the test over the U.S. GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovation). The group transferred data using BGP and the new MNLR protocol. They ran the data between 27 nodes representing the network of the incident control center, the 911 call center and the office of emergency management.

While BGP took about 150 seconds to recover from a link failure, MNLR recovered in less than 30 seconds. The recovery metrics showed that the new MNLR protocol transferred information faster and more reliably than existing protocols in the event of network failures and topology changes.

“While BGP has a recommended default keep alive message interval of 60 seconds, MNLR is not so constrained,” said Shenoy. “In fact, MNLR can detect failure with one missing keep alive message as the failure or topology change information will be flooded internet wide, which can be expected in certain cases with BGP.”

Shenoy said that the main issue with current protocols stems from the fact that they were invented several decades ago and not for the type of network scenarios experienced in current internet. Thus, BGP and OSPF are unreliable and that manifests when a link fails, she said.

“If you receive an email five minutes late, that is still acceptable,” Shenoy said. “But in an emergency situation, the implicit impact of these serious network problems truly come to light.”

In an emergency situation, information becomes too old after about eight minutes, adds Schneider, who leads RIT’s Collaboratory for Resiliency and Recovery. “We are on the cusp of generating and collecting all this great technical information, but we need to be able to share it and create the situational awareness decision-makers need.”

RIT notes that the team is continuing to develop and enhance the MNLR protocol. In the future, the team plans to test and implement the protocol in emergency situations.