Partitioning-based approach to control the restored path length in p-cycle-based survivable optical networks

Abstract

In recent years, p-cycles have been widely investigated for survivability of WDM networks. They provide fast recovery speed such as ring and capacity efficiency as mesh survivability schemes. However, restoration paths are very long, which causes excessive latency and intolerable physical impairments. On the other hand, nowadays, a wide set of applications require an optical path with almost no delay. The existing approaches, namely loopbacks removal and inter-cycle switching, provide a significant reduction in the restored path, but even then a number of restored paths remain many times longer than the working path lengths. In this paper, we propose a network partitioning-based approach to control the length of each restored path as per delay sustainability of time critical applications. The basic idea of the work is to partition the network into domains and construct the p-cycles for each domain independently. The domain wise construction of p-cycles restricts their length, which consequently reduces the length of restored paths. Here, we introduce a new concept where the selected border nodes are overlapped among adjacent domains to cover inter-domain spans of the network as a domain span in order to ensure their survivability through domain p-cycles. Simulation results show that the proposed solution is good enough to control the restored path length with small augmentation in redundancy of spare capacity as compared to optimal design of p-cycles. More importantly, it enhances the dual failure restorability significantly.