There have been many recent extensions to the routing and signalling protocols to increase network and node availability. These extensions are different for the IGPs, BGP, multicast, and MPLS signalling protocols because unicast, multicast and MPLS all have different network characteristics.

This presentation will give an overview of the extentions and describe what will be observed by network operators and their customers. Also, there will be a description of the tradeoffs between choosing a protection/restoration approach at different layers of the network and practical deployment considerations.