Shared partial path protection in WDM networks with shared risk link groups

Abstract

For 100% shared risk link group (SRLG) failure protection, conventional full path protection has to satisfy SRLG-disjoint constraints, i.e., its working path and backup path cannot go though the same SRLG. With the increase of size and number of SRLGs, capacity efficiency of conventional shared full path protection becomes poorer due to SRLG-disjoint constraints and the blocking probability becomes much higher due to severe traps. To solve these problems, we present a partial path protection scheme where SRLG-disjoint backup paths may only cover part of the working path. Full path protection becomes a special case of partial path protection, in which the backup path covers the full working path. By choosing the most survivable partial backup path as backup path, we can make the impact of SRLG failures as low as possible and accept as many as possible connection requests. Assuming every SRLG has the same probability to fail, we present a heuristic algorithm to find the most survivable partial backup path by choosing full path protection first, iteratively computing partial backup paths and choosing the most survivable one. The benefit of this heuristic algorithm is that it can find the optimal results within less iteration. Analytical and simulation results show that, compared to conventional full path protection, our proposed scheme can significantly reduce blocking probability with little sacrifice on survivability. The proposed scheme is very useful particularly when the network contains a lot of SRLGs and the blocking probability of conventional full path protection becomes too high.