A Survey on the p-Cycle Protection Method

This paper presents a comprehensive survey for the pre-configured cycle (p-cycle) protection method which is a relatively new scheme for network survivability with many interesting properties, and has been attracting quite a lot of attention. We review different aspects of p-cycles and survey the studies on this and other related survivability schemes. This survey paper is the first attempt to present a rapid overview of this interesting subject and provide and agile reference of the broad p-cycle topic. In addition to addressing the concepts and preliminaries, this survey covers advanced topics related to p-cycles such as path protecting p-cycles, availability-aware design with p-cycles, p-cycle reconfiguration, column generation approach for p-cycle network design and p-cycles in multicast networks.