AN EFFICIENT MECHANISM FOR FAST RECOVERY IN CASE OF BORDER ROUTER NODE FAILURE IN A COMPUTER NETWORK
A technique protects traffic (IP) against the failure of a border router between two domains in a computer network using Fast Reroute and backup tunnels. The border router (i.e., the "protected border router") announces/advertises a list of all its adjacent next-hop routers (i.e., its "neighbors") residing in first and second domains interconnected by the protected border router. A neighbor in the first domain that is immediately upstream to the protected border router and that is configured to protect the border router (i.e., the "protecting router") learns address prefixes (i.e., "protected prefixes") reachable from the next-hop router in the second domain (i.e., "next-next-hops," NNHOPs to the protected prefixes from the protecting router). The protecting router calculates a backup tunnel to each NNHOP that excludes the protected border router, and associates each backup tunnel with protected prefixes accordingly. When the protected border router fails, Fast Reroute is triggered, and the protected prefixes are rerouted by the protecting router onto an appropriate backup tunnel to a corresponding is NNHOP.