Holding time aware differentiated protection method for survivable waveband switching optical networks

Abstract

Due to the number of wavelengths in fibers increasing, the transmission ports consumed in optical cross-connect (OXC) are greatly enhanced. To reduce the complexity and the cost of OXC, waveband switching technology is proposed. At the same time, since an optical channel carries a lot of traffic, its failure may lead to a huge data loss. Therefore, survivability in waveband switching (WBS) optical networks is important. Previous work for survivable WBS optical networks did not consider the holding time of connection request. However, in a practical network, the different connection requests generally have different holding times. This fact affects the network performances. In this paper, we propose a new method, holding time aware differentiated protection (HTADP), to provide the survivability for single-link failure in WBS optical networks. In HTADP, if the holding time of a connection request is smaller than the preset threshold, the protection path will not be assigned for saving network resources. In addition, we design a waveband integrated auxiliary graph for HTADP to well support the routing and waveband assignment. Simulation results demonstrate that HTADP not only saves more transmission ports but also is able to obtain lower blocking probability compared with previous method.