Redundancy and load balancing at IP layer in access and aggregation networks

Abstract

Mobile communications trends are towards the convergence of mobile telephone network and Internet. People usage of mobile telecommunications is evolving to be as on fixed broadband devices.

Thus, mobile operators need to evolve their mobile legacy networks, in order to support new services and offer similar availability and reliability than the rest of Internet. The emergence of all-IP standards, like Long Term Evolution, is pushing this evolution to its final step. The challenging and highly variable access and aggregation networks are the scope of such improvements.

The thesis presents in detail different methods for increasing availability on high-end switches, analyzing its strengths and weaknesses. It finally evaluates the implementation of an enhanced VRRP as a solution for high availability testing then feature on a real network.