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.