Understanding the trade-offs associated with sharing protection

Judging by the nine node example, a significant percentage of OEO conversions can be eliminated by using an all optical network (AON) architecture. A protection scheme based on BLSRs, called P-cycles, has been proposed to be able to share protection within the AON architecture. The P-cycle approach had fewer OEO conversions and used fewer wavelength kilometers than the dedicated model without suffering a significant availability penalty. P-cycles were found to be nearly as effective as mesh algorithms at reducing bandwidth requirements while requiring 46% fewer OEO conversions.