Failure-specific self-protecting multipaths — increased capacity savings or overengineering?

The self-protection multipath (SPM) is a simple protection switching mechanism. It distributes the traffic over several disjoint paths from source to destination according to a traffic distribution function. When a path fails, the traffic is redistributed to the working paths according to another traffic distribution function, i.e., the traffic distribution function depends on the failed path. The contribution of this work is the introduction of a failure-specific traffic distribution function for the SPM that depends on the exact failure of the paths. We present a linear program for the global optimization of the traffic distribution function of all SPMs in all protected failure scenarios. Finally, we compare the amount of protected traffic that can be transported in the network for the conventional SPM and the new failure-specific SPM (FSPM).