<title>Dynamic establishment of segmented protection paths in single and multi-fiber WDM mesh networks</title>

Abstract

Wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) networks are matured to provide, scalable data centric infrastructure, capable of delivering flexible, value added, high speed and high bandwidth services directly from the optical (WDM) layer. But, providing fault-tolerance at an acceptable level of overhead in these networks has become a critical problem. Several methods exist in the literature which attempt to guarantee recovery in a timely and resource efficient manner. These methods are centered around a-priori reservation of network resources called spare resources along a node disjoint protection path. This protection path is usually routed from source to destination along a totally link disjoint path from primary path. This paper considers the problem of routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) in wavelength routed WDM optical networks. In particular, we propose an efficient algorithm to select routes and wavelengths to establish dependable connections (D-connections), called segmented protection paths. Our algorithm does not insist on the existence of totally disjoint paths to provide full protection. We present experimental results which suggest that our scheme is attractive enough in terms of average call acceptanc ratio, spare wavelength utilisation, and number of requests that can be satisfied for a given number of wavelengths assuming that the requests come one at time, and wavelengths are assigned according to fixed ordering.