Potential for spare capacity preconnection to reduce crossconnection workloads in mesh-restorable networks

A new approach is considered for mesh-restorable networks in which distributed computation of the restoration plan may be much faster than crossconnection to implement the plan. Spare capacity is preconnected in an optimised way. On failure, a distributed restoration algorithm computes the set of spare-link crossconnections needed at each node. To the extent that useful preconnections are present at each node, real time crossconnection workloads are reduced, accelerating restoration. The authors present an upper-bound assessment of the potential for failure readiness via preconnection