US Patent 9160652 Fast reroute for bidirectional co-routed traffic engineering tunnels

In one embodiment, network devices are configured to route traffic and signaling onto co-routed bypass tunnels. Co-routed bypass tunnels protect against node or link failures in a label switched paths. The co-routed bypass tunnels provide bidirectional protection. In one example, a node acting as the point of local repair (PLR) receives a resource reservation state message at a first node and extracts a tunnel sender address from the reservation state message. The PLR is configured to identify a bypass tunnel to a second node in the reverse direction of the label switched path and signal resource reservation messages over the bypass tunnel in the reverse direction. In another example, a PLR receives a resource reservation message with bypass tunnel identification and the PLR is configured to identify a bypass tunnel to a second node in the reverse direction.