Service providers (e.g., Internet service providers, telecommunications providers, etc.) have strict service level agreements (SLAs) for services they provide to their customers. Often, a requirement of a SLA is to provide an upper bound on service unavailability time due to failures within the service provider's infrastructure (including the infrastructure that connects customer equipment to service provider equipment). The upper bound on service unavailability time is required to be on the order of tens of milliseconds. That, in turn, requires fast connectivity restoration with a deterministic upper bound. Some service providers offer a virtual private local area network (LAN) service (VPLS) (e.g., a way to provide Ethernet-based multipoint to multipoint communication over Internet protocol (IP)/multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) networks) to their customers. In order to provide connectivity restoration with a deterministic upper bound for VPLS, service providers have to address three types of failures: (1) access link failures; (2) provider edge (PE) node (e.g., network device) failures; and (3) penultimate (or provider (P)) node or core link failures.
Existing solutions rely on the control plane to converge before customer service is restored. Since control plane convergence is not deterministic, and thus cannot be predicted beforehand, it is often not an acceptable solution for service providers who have to design their network to meet SLAs that require fast and deterministic service restoration for their customers. Furthermore, there are no existing solutions that provide fast connectivity restoration with a deterministic upper bound for VPLS when access link failures (e.g., type (1) failures) and PE node failures (e.g., type (2) failures) occur.