Rapid and Efficient Protection for All-Optical WDM Mesh Networks

Abstract

Survivability becomes increasingly critical in managing high-speed networks as data traffic continues to grow in both size and importance. In addition, the impact of failures is exacerbated by the higher data rates available in optical networks. It is therefore imperative to address network survivability in an efficient manner in order to design and operate reliable networks. Transparent optical networks (TONs) provide several advantages over optically opaque networks for supporting the growing communication demands, but suffer from several drawbacks that reduce the efficacy of most applicable capacity-efficient survivability techniques. In this paper, we present a protection algorithm (for single link and/or node failures) called Streams. Streams protection is identical to 1:1 dedicated path protection in terms of recovery speed, but requires significantly less capacity. We study both online non-dynamic routing as well as (online) dynamic provisioning scenarios to compare Streams with dedicated and shared path protection in terms of capacity, blocking probability, path lengths, and recovery time/data loss, and report the relative tradeoffs between the different protection schemes in detail. Our results show that our simple heuristic for Streams under online provisioning scenarios offer attractive tradeoffs in terms of blocking, recovery speed, data loss and implementation overhead. We also briefly cover simple ILP solutions to address static offline routing problems, and show that the Streams protection scheme is also efficient under offline routing scenarios as well.