Optical Mesh Research Articles

Cost Efficient Fault Tolerant Design in Mesh Optical Networks with the Load Aware Method

With increasing wavelength capacity, the fault tolerant policy of the mesh optical network becomes much more important. To meet the survivability requirement, a set of cost efficient fault tolerant mechanisms are designed in this paper. The main objective is the minimization of the total number of required wavelengths. Furthermore, based on the method of the Integer Linear Program (ILP), shared-path protection and shared-link protection strategies are achieved, respectively. Moreover, the objective of minimizing the load imbalance is used to ensure the network resources utilized efficiently, and then the wavelength contention can be mitigated by selecting the working path and backup path reasonably. The results show that the survivability of the optical network can be guaranteed in a cost efficient manner.

Drive to miniaturization: integrated optical networks on mobile platforms

With rapid growth of the Internet, bandwidth demand for data traffic is continuing to explode. In addition, emerging and future applications are becoming more and more network centric. With the proliferation of data communication platforms and data-intensive applications (e.g. cloud computing), high-bandwidth materials such as video clips dominating the Internet, and social networking tools, a networking technology is very desirable which can scale the Internet’s capability (particularly its bandwidth) by two to three orders of magnitude. As the limits of Moore’s law are approached, optical mesh networks based on wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) have the ability to satisfy the large- and scalable-bandwidth requirements of our future backbone telecommunication networks. In addition, this trend is also affecting other special-purpose systems in applications such as mobile platforms, automobiles, aircraft, ships, tanks, and micro unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) which are becoming independent systems roaming the sky while sensing data, processing, making decisions, and even communicating and networking with other heterogeneous systems. Recently, WDM optical technologies have seen advances in its transmission speeds, switching technologies, routing protocols, and control systems. Such advances have made WDM optical technology an appealing choice for the design of future Internet architectures. Along these lines, scientists across the entire spectrum of the network architectures from physical layer to applications have been working on developing devices and communication protocols which can take full advantage of the rapid advances in WDM technology. Nevertheless, the focus has always been on large-scale telecommunication networks that span hundreds and even thousands of miles. Given these advances, we investigate the vision and applicability of integrating the traditionally large-scale WDM optical networks into miniaturized mobile platforms such as UAVs. We explain the benefits of WDM optical technology for these applications. We also describe some of the limitations of WDM optical networks as the size of a vehicle gets smaller, such as in micro-UAVs, and study the miniaturization and communication system limitations in such environments.

Nonlinear Penalties in Dynamic Optical Networks Employing Autonomous Transponders

We report for the first time on the limitations in the operational power range of network traffic in the presence of heterogeneous 28-Gbaud polarization-multiplexed quadrature amplitude modulation (PM-mQAM) channels in a nine-channel dynamic optical mesh network. In particular, we demonstrate that transponders which autonomously select a modulation order and launch power to optimize their own performance will have a severe impact on copropagating network traffic. Our results also suggest that altruistic transponder operation may offer even lower penalties than fixed launch power operation.

A novel segment-shared protection algorithm based on dynamic domain-sequencing scheme for multi-domain optical mesh networks

Survivability has been widely recognized as an important design issue for optical networks. In practice, as the network scale keeps expanding, this design problem becomes more critical. Due to scalability and domain privacy, designing the protection scheme in multi-domain networks is more difficult than that in single domain networks. The path computation element (PCE) is known as an efficient architecture to compute optimal traffic engineering (TE) paths in multi-domain multilayer networks. Based on the PCE architecture, we first propose a new dynamic domain-sequencing scheme that considers the load balance of inter-domain links and then propose an improved segment-shared protection approach called DDSP. It can provide 100% protection ability for multiple failures that each single domain has only one failed link. Finally, the protection based on the optimal dynamic domain-sequencing scheme, called OPT, is designed, to evaluate performance of our algorithm and to provide the good bounding for the dynamic domain-sequencing scheme with limited intra TE information. Simulation evaluation shows that the proposed scheme is effective in multi-domain path protection with more efficient resource utilization, lower blocking probabilities and less inter-domain cost. Furthermore, the performance of it is near to OPT.

Nonlinear and ROADM induced penalties in 28 Gbaud dynamic optical mesh networks employing electronic signal processing

We report the impact of cascaded reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer induced penalties on coherently-detected 28 Gbaud polarization multiplexed m-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (PM m-ary QAM) WDM channels. We investigate the interplay between different higher-order modulation channels and the effect of filter shapes and bandwidth of (de)multiplexers on the transmission performance, in a segment of pan-European optical network with a maximum optical path of 4,560 km (80km x 57 spans). We verify that if the link capacities are assigned assuming that digital back propagation is available, 25% of the network connections fail using electronic dispersion compensation alone. However, majority of such links can indeed be restored by employing single-channel digital back-propagation employing less than 15 steps for the whole link, facilitating practical application of DBP. We report that higher-order channels are most sensitive to nonlinear fiber impairments and filtering effects, however these formats are less prone to ROADM induced penalties due to the reduced maximum number of hops. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that a minimum filter Gaussian order of 3 and bandwidth of 35 GHz enable negligible excess penalty for any modulation order.

Uniform waveband assignment in optical mesh networks

The cost of an optical network in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks can be reduced using optical reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs), which allow traffic to pass through without the need for an expensive optical-electro-optical (O-E-O) conversion. Waveband switching (WBS) is another technique to reduce the network cost by grouping consecutive wavelengths and switching them together using a single port per waveband. WBS has attracted the attention of researchers for its efficiency in reducing switching complexity and therefore cost in WDM optical networks. In this paper, we consider the problem of switching wavelengths as non-overlapping uniform wavebands, per link, for mesh networks using the minimum number of wavebands. Given a fixed band size b s , we give integer linear programming formulations and present a heuristic solution to minimize the number of ROADMs (number of wavebands) in mesh networks that support a given traffic pattern. We show that the number of ROADMs (or number of ports in band-switching cross-connects) can be reduced significantly in mesh networks with WBS compared to wavelength switching using either the ILP or the heuristic algorithm. We also examine the performance of our band assignment algorithms under dynamic traffic.

A Novel SLA Framework for Time-Differentiated Resilience in Optical Mesh Networks

Telecom customers may have specific time periods during which they require extra resilience. However, these time-differentiated resilience requirements are not effectively addressed by current service level agreement (SLA) frameworks. To satisfy these high priority periods, a generic SLA framework typically provides upgraded protection over the entire service duration, which is unnecessary and expensive. In this study, we propose a novel SLA framework that allows customers to specify critical windows (CWs) to address their time-differentiated demands for resilience. CWs correspond to the resilience-sensitive periods, and connections are backed up during CWs using pre-cross-connected protection. To achieve high resource efficiency, we identify opportunities for backup resource sharing in a time-domain multiplexing manner. Two heuristic schemes are proposed, namely, Locally and Globally CW-Aware connection assignments. Our study on a sample optical mesh network shows that, by applying our SLA framework, 1) resource efficiency can be significantly improved, 2) CWs are effectively protected with high resilience (in terms of availability), 3) the availability of CWs can be increased almost linearly with used backup resources, and (4) our framework (approach) requires low operational complexity.

Distributed Protocol for Removal of Loop Backs with Asymmetric Digraph Using GMPLS in P-Cycle Based Optical Networks

Pre-configured protection cycles (p-cycles) have drawn many attentions due to the fully pre-connected cyclic structures, ring-like speed, mesh-like spare capacity efficiencies and fast switching characteristics. In this paper, we propose a novel removal of loop back (RLB) approach with standard protocol extension (the flooding based distributed cycle pre-configuration (F-DCPC)) to solve the resource inefficiency issue due to long restored paths for symmetric dynamic networks. Meanwhile, distributed cycle pre-configuration (DCPC) is a representative technique for automatic p-cycle configuration. But for the mesh network topology under asymmetric service distribution, it works especially with more network convergence time and larger amount of extra controlling overhead. So in our RLB approach, F-DCPC scheme using generalized multi-protocol label switching (GMPLS) protocol to solve the problems of configurations and reconfigurations with asymmetric digraph in high-speed optical mesh networks is presented. Additionally, to describe the basic idea of traffic splitting strategy in the unidirectional resource distribution, we present the mathematic model with a heuristic algorithm to accelerate resource configuration. We evaluate the performance of F-DCPC utilizing proposed RLB approach with various classical p-cycles enumeration algorithms and allocation strategies by experimental simulations implemented in OPNET modeler, and the simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Local segment-shared protection based on source egress gateway selection for multi-domain optical mesh networks

Survivability for multi-domain optical networks is becoming a key parameter due to expanding network. In order to provide the shared-path-protected lightpath in multi-domain optical mesh networks, we propose a protection solution, called GSLSSP. A new source egress gateway selecting mechanism is adopted in this solution. For each connection request, this mechanism can enable the source node to select a better egress gateway node to the destination domain and compute one inter-domain working path near the optimal path with the cooperating of this gateway node, under scalability and domain privacy constraint of multi-domain networks. And then one intra-domain link-disjoint local segment-backup path for each working-segment path is computed out in each single-domain passed by the working path. Simulation evaluation shows that the proposed scheme can provide 100% protection ability for multiple failures. Besides, it is effective in multi-domain path protection with more efficient resource utilization, lower blocking probabilities and less inter-domain cost than other schemes.

A hybrid protection strategy based on node-disjointness against double failures in optical mesh networks

As the size and the complexity of optical mesh networks are continuing to grow and the severe natural disasters are occurring more frequently in recent years, multiple failures (link failures or node failures) become increasing probable. Protection strategies against these failures generally provision backup paths for working paths based on link-disjointness or node-disjointness. Compared with link-disjoint protection, node-disjoint protection means higher degree of risk isolation and can accommodate both link failures and node failures. This motivates us to propose a hybrid node-disjoint protection, named Segment and Path Shared Protection (SPSP), to provide 100% protection against arbitrary simultaneous double-node failures (the worst double-failure case). For each service connection request, SPSP first provisions backup segments for the working segments, respectively, as the primary backup resources, then provisions a single backup path for the whole working path as the second backup resource. In addition to its complete protection capability and flexible scalability for double failures, SPSP can also obtain better network load balance and resource sharing degree by dynamic link-cost adjustment and reserved backup resource sharing. Simulation results show that SPSP can achieve a shorter average recovery time than path shared protection (PSP) and higher resource utilization and lower blocking probability than segment shared protection (SSP).

网状光网络中基于信令的路径段保护方法

Path protections have become increasingly important for current mesh optical networks because fast restorations in generalized multiprotocol label switching (GMPLS) networks are uncertain. However, setting up additional disjoint paths to protect connections leads to more path setup blocking and signaling collisions. We analyze signaling collisions, path blocking and blocking probability, as well as calculate node-to-node blocking probabilities. A signaling-based path-segment protection (PSP) is proposed, which integrates segment protections and path protections as well as enhances the performance of path protections and ring protections. The setup of PSP connections causes less blocking probability than the setup of path protection connections in the simulations.

Reconstruction of three-dimensional occluded object using optical flow and triangular mesh reconstruction in integral imaging

We proposed a reconstruction method for the occluded region of three-dimensional (3D) object using the depth extraction based on the optical flow and triangular mesh reconstruction in integral imaging. The depth information of sub-images from the acquired elemental image set is extracted using the optical flow with sub-pixel accuracy, which alleviates the depth quantization problem. The extracted depth maps of sub-image array are segmented by the depth threshold from the histogram based segmentation, which is represented as the point clouds. The point clouds are projected to the viewpoint of center sub-image and reconstructed by the triangular mesh reconstruction. The experimental results support the validity of the proposed method with high accuracy of peak signal-to-noise ratio and normalized cross-correlation in 3D image recognition.

Dynamic waveband grooming based on hierarchical integrated grooming auxiliary graph in multi-domain mesh optical networks

With the number of wavelengths in fibers increasing, the number of optical switching ports in conventional Optical Cross-Connect (OXC) keeps enhancing, so that waveband grooming technique is proposed to save the switching ports in OXC. Most of previous works focused on waveband grooming in single-domain optical network. Since the current optical backbone is actually divided to multiple domains according to the different network providers, it is necessary to study the waveband grooming in multi-domain optical networks. However, waveband grooming in multi-domain optical networks is more challenging than that in single domain networks because of the routing scalability and security issues. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new heuristic Hierarchical Multi-domain Waveband Grooming (HMWG) algorithm based on Hierarchical Integrated Grooming Auxiliary Graph (H-IGAG) to reduce the total number of optical switching ports. The H-IGAG is compared of the Intra-domain Waveband Integrated Auxiliary Graph (Intra-WIAG) and the Inter-domain waveband Virtual Topology Graph (Inter-VTG). For the demand in single-domain, HMWG directly computes the route from the source node to destination node in the single-domain with waveband grooming on Intra-WIAG. For the demand spanning different domains, HMWG first computes the route from the source node to the selected border node in source domain and computes the route from the selected border node to the destination node in destination domain with waveband grooming on Intra-WIAG, respectively. Then, HMWG computes the route from the selected border node in source domain to the selected border node in destination domain with waveband grooming on Inter-VTG. Simulation results show that, compared with previous grooming algorithm, HMWG can obtain better performance.

Distributed dynamic grooming routing and wavelength assignment in WDM optical mesh networks

The bandwidth of a wavelength channel in WDM optical networks is very high compared to the user's requirements for various applications. Therefore, there is a scope for better utilization of channel bandwidth by traffic grooming, in which several user's channels are multiplexed for transmission over a single channel. Several research works have been reported on traffic grooming routing and wavelength assignment (GRWA) for static and dynamic traffic pattern under centralized environment. Distributed dynamic grooming routing and wavelength assignment (DDGRWA) is a new and quite unexplored area in WDM optical mesh networks. This article introduces the concept of distributed traffic grooming in WDM mesh networks which also includes virtual topology construction, reconfiguration, routing and wavelength assignment in the distributed environment assuming incoming traffic to be dynamic in nature. We have also presented simulation results of our algorithm on dynamically generated traffic under various network topologies.

Wireless mesh and optical burst switching convergence for a novel metropolitan area network architecture

Wireless mesh networks (WMN) have attracted increasing attention from the research community as a high-performance and low-cost solution to last-mile broadband Internet access. In the other side, optical burst switching (OBS) is a promising metropolitan solution [1] that uses optical fiber with burst switching paradigm. In this paper, we propose a novel Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) architecture, called Optical Burst Wireless Mesh Architecture (OBWMA) which integrates WMN at the user access side and OBS at the core of the MAN. OBWMA aims to combine advantages of both WMNs and OBS networks, such as large coverage at low cost and bandwidth availability. We specify the details of the interconnection and the internetworking of WMNs and the OBS network in OBWMA. Moreover, we develop an analytical model to compute the end-to-end delay in OBWMA in order to support flow requests with delay constraints. Furthermore, we propose: (1) a bandwidth provisioning scheme for the WMN part (WBP); (2) a bandwidth provisioning scheme for the OBS part (WPBP); (3) an adaptive burst assembly scheme (AHBA) at the border between WMN and OBS; and (4) a control bridge (CB) that ensures Quality of Service (QoS) mapping at the border between the WMN and OBS. Simulation results using ns-2 demonstrate the feasibility of OBWMA, the accuracy of the proposed analytical model and the effectiveness of WBP, WPBP and AHBA to provide QoS provisioning for the converged network.

Ellipse-underlay protection algorithm to deal with regional demolishments in mesh optical networks

For the abundant bandwidth, a malfunction in optical networks causes a great deal of loss to traffic, and hence the survivability of optical networks must be considered. Two technologies, protection and restoration, are used in general, and the former is investigated in this paper. The existing protection strategies mainly cope with a single link failure or a double-link failure in an optical network and not consider what causes these failures. In this paper, we study the reasons which lead to the network malfunctions, and pose a new concept named regional demolishment. A protection algorithm named Ellipse-underlay algorithm is also proposed. We compare the performance of the Ellipse-underlay algorithm to the Node-disjoint algorithm. Simulation results show that the Ellipse-underlay algorithm is more effective to the survivability of traffic than the Node-disjoint algorithm.

EA-HD: a novel link state update mechanism for ASON

When a connection request comes in a mesh optical network, the routers automatically choose the suitable routing paths and wavelength to it according to the network topology and link-state information saved in its global link-state database. Because some of these wavelengths may be released or occupied at any time, the global state database is always out of date and need update by some update policy. A suitable link-state update policy is critical, since a high-frequency update policy imposes heavy burden on the network, while a low-frequency update would increase the inaccurate of the global link-state database. In this paper, we propose a link-state update policy, named the EA-HD policy, which considers two index of a link, one is the Hamming distance between the local link-state database and the global link-state database, and the other is the used ratio of its wavelengths. The proposed update policy gets a trade-off between the accurate of link-state information and its update cost. Simulation results prove that our scheme achieves a good performance in traffic blocking probability while maintaining moderate volume of update traffic.

Multicast protection scheme based on Hamiltonian cycle in fault-tolerant optical mesh networks

The increase of multimedia service requirements results in the growing popularity of the multicast in Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (WDM) optical mesh networks. Multicast fault tolerance in WDM optical mesh networks is an important issue because failures caused by the traffic carried in WDM optical mesh networks may lead to huge data loss. Previous works have proposed multicast protection algorithms to address the single-fiber link failure dominant in current optical mesh networks. However, these existing algorithms are all mainly based on path protection or segment protection, which may lead to long restoration times and complicated protection switching procedures. This paper therefore proposes a new heuristic algorithm, called Enhanced Multicast Hamiltonian Cycle Protection (EMHCP), in which all working light-trees of multicast demands can be protected by a Hamiltonian cycle in the network. For each multicast demand, EMHCP computes a least-cost light-tree based on the presented link-cost function that considers load balancing and proper straddling link selection so that backup wavelengths on the Hamiltonian cycle can be reduced. Simulation results show that EMHCP can obtain significant performance improvement compared with the conventional algorithm.

Shared-Path Protection With Delay Tolerance (SDT) in Optical WDM Mesh Networks

Optical wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) networks have emerged as an ideal backbone for the dynamic transport of bandwidth-intensive applications. Most emerging applications require end-to-end survivable connections to be set up for specific time durations that have sliding or fixed setup times (such as IPTV, grid computing backup storage). It is critical for the development of future network infrastructure that user-centric, dynamic, and end-to-end management and control mechanisms are devised to bridge the gap between the transport capacity and the needs of new applications at the customer edges. In this paper, we study the problem of dynamic provisioning of user-controlled connection requests that have specified holding times and delay tolerances. Delay tolerance is a measure of customer patience, and it is defined as the duration a connection request can be held until it is set up. A connection that cannot be established at the instant of its request could potentially be set up in the remaining duration of its delay tolerance. In this study, different dynamic scheduling algorithms are developed and compared by giving priority to connections according to their arrival rates, delay tolerances, and holding times. Using a mathematical model for impatient requests and simulation experiments, we show that delay tolerance flexibility in the traffic model provides a reduction of up to 50% on blocking probability, without the use of extra backup capacity.

On Delay Performance and Burst Assembly for Wireless Mesh and Optical Burst Switching Converged Metro Area Network

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) have attracted increasing attention from the research community as a high-performance and low-cost solution to last-mile broadband Internet access. On the other side, Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is a promising access technology that uses optical fiber with burst switching paradigm. In this paper, we propose a novel Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) architecture, called Optical Burst Wireless Mesh Architecture (OBWMA) which integrates WMN at the user access side and OBS at the core of the MAN. OBWMA aims to combine advantages of both WMNs and OBS networks, such as large coverage at low cost and bandwidth availability. We specify the details of the interconnection and the internetworking of WMNs and the OBS network in OBWMA. Moreover, we develop an analytical model to compute the end-to-end delay in OBWMA in order to support flow requests with delay constraints. Furthermore, we propose a Control Bridge (CB) that ensures Quality of Service (QoS) mapping at the border between the WMN and the OBS parts. Also, we propose a burst assembly scheme, called Adaptive Hybrid Burst Assembly scheme (AHBA). Simulation results using ns-2 demonstrate the feasibility of OBWMA and the validity of our analytical model.