Hybrid survivability approaches for optical WDM mesh networks

This paper studies the problem of providing recovery from link failures in optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks. One of the widely studied mechanisms is dynamic link restoration, which provides recovery by determining restoration paths around a link after a failure occurs. This mechanism leads to a lower backup resource utilization, fast failure signaling rate, and a scalable operation. However, one of the main drawbacks of uncoordinated dynamic restoration is the inability to provide a 100% recovery for all connections, especially at high network loads. An alternate solution is proactive protection, where backup capacity is reserved during connection setup that can guarantee recovery under certain conditions (e.g., single link failures) but requires higher backup capacity and has low spare capacity utilization when failures do not occur. This paper presents two hybrid survivability approaches that combine the positive effects of restoration and protection. The proposed algorithms make use of available or collected network state information, such as link load, to identify critical links or segments in the network that are then proactively protected. The overall goal of the proposed approaches is to improve the restoration efficiency by providing a tradeoff between proactive protection and dynamic restoration. This paper presents a detailed performance analysis of the proposed algorithms. Experimental results show that under high loads, both the proposed approaches maintain a consistent restoration efficiency of at least 10%, or higher, when compared to the basic restoration scheme.