Preconfigured Ball (p-Ball) Protection Method With Minimum Backup Links for Dual-Link Failure in Optical Mesh Networks

This letter focuses on the protection method for all dual-link failures in optical mesh networks. We first state the problem and discuss the possible scenarios of dual-link failures. We then present our proposed preconfigured ball (p-Ball) protection method that provides protection against dual-link failures using fewer backup links than preconfigured cycles (p-Cycles). We propose integer linear programming to formulate the p-Ball protection method. We also propose a heuristic algorithm to find backup paths in p-Ball. Simulation results show that p-Ball is better than p-Cycle in both construction cost metrics (such as backup link number, resource redundancy, etc.) and operation cost metrics (such as average hop, protection resource utilization ratio, etc.).