Analysis of the trade-off between availability and backup resource sharing

On-line connection provisioning with protection in WDM networks may only provide availability guarantees if either dedicated backup resources are used or backup resource sharing is limited. However, resource sharing may be limited in a number of different ways and, clearly, the choice of the sharing limit interferes with the behavior of the protection scheme used. The paper investigates the trade-offs that are behind the choice of protection schemes and sharing restrictions with respect to blocking probability and connection availability. Results of simulations carried out in a European WDM network topology are used to draw conclusions.