Incremental optical network topology optimization using meta-mesh span restoration

In recent years, many mechanisms have been proposed for efficient network survivability. Localized span restoration and end-to-end path restoration are two well known general approaches. While path restoration is more efficient with respect to capacity, span restoration is simpler and faster to implement and design. The meta-mesh scheme was proposed a number of years ago to bridge that gap in sparse network topologies, providing more capacity-efficient designs with a simple span-restoration-like mechanism. We develop a new node-arc meta-mesh ILP formulation and further extend that formulation to allow for incremental topology optimization. Results show that even where topology is flexible, thereby allowing a span-restorable network to use a higher-connectivity topology, meta-mesh restoration can outperform span restoration in terms of capacity and number of spans required.