Dynamic protection provisioning with FIPP p-cycles in WDM networks

Application opportunities associated with video, voice and data triple play result in a dramatic demand increase in metro transport networks, with many traffic patterns becoming increasingly dynamic and difficult to predict. This is driving the need of core networks with a high degree of flexibility and granularity to carry traffic. We propose to investigate the question of what this means in terms of dynamic protection provisioning. In other words, we want to study how much a dynamic traffic affects the protection structures and how stable are the protection structures under dynamic traffic. While most studies on the stability of protection structures have been done on p-cycles and link shared protection, we investigate here the stability of FIPP p-cycles under dynamic traffic. For doing so, we design and develop a scalable mathematical model that we solve using large scale optimization tools. Numerical results show that FIPP p-cycles are remarkably stable with respect to the evaluation of the number of cross-connections to be reset under dynamic traffic.