UPSR-like p-cycles: A new approach to dual failure protection

Most approaches to improve dual failure restorability characteristics of p-cycle designs remain within the paradigm of shared protection. In this paper we investigate a novel p-cycle-based dedicated protection architecture, somewhat resembling UPSR rings, called ¿UPSR-like p-cycles¿, that could be used to enable high levels of dual failure restorability for select services. We develop a fast and efficient method for designing networks protected by UPSR-like p-cycles based on integer linear programming (ILP) methods. We show that UPSR-like p-cycles are able to take advantage of the mesh network topology to closely approach the efficiency limit for dedicated protection, and demonstrate a failure reaction policy that is able to provide greatly improved dual failure restorability for straddler-routed demands.