Time-Differentiated Resilience in Telecom Mesh Networks

Many telecom, customers have applications with time varying reliability requirements. However, current for a service-level agreement (SLA) frameworks provide the same reliability during the entire holding time, rather than providing high reliability only when required. Recent papers describe the need for time-differentiated resilience and establish an SLA framework to support this using Critical Windows (CW). CWs are scheduled, regularly repeating time periods where additional resilience is required. We expand the previous work to a more general and dynamic network setting and further investigate the structural properties of critical windows. We propose and evaluate first an algorithm for CW-aware path assignment in mesh telecom networks, and then a CW-aware algorithm that also employs Shared-Path Protection (SPP). Our study shows: 1) that CWs provide a substantial performance improvement in mesh networks; 2) CW performance gain is insensitive to several network parameters; and 3) CWs can be implemented on top of generic SPP to provide even better performance.