A Simple Priority Mechanism for Shared-Protection Schemes

One of the major challenges of optical network operators is ensuring the stringent levels of availability required by their highest-class clients. To achieve this, we introduce relative priorities among the different primary connections contending for access to the protection paths. In this letter, we propose an analytical model for the proposed priority-enabled scheme. As a key distinguishing feature from existing literature, we derive explicit analytic expressions for the average availability and service disruption rate for the different priority classes