A self-healing network with an economical spare-channel assignment

With the advent of networking technologies intelligent network elements, such as the digital cross-connect system (DCS), will make it possible to dynamically reconfigure a network for restoration purposes. Both restoration control of DCSs and spare-channel design issues are presented, and how they work together so that a fast and economical SONET self-healing network is obtained. In order to achieve fast restoration, a distributed control mechanism that is applicable to both line and path restoration is proposed. The proposed method allows the shared use of spare channels for various failure scenarios, including multiple failure cases, so that the efficient use of spare channels can be achieved. A linear-programming-based scheme is proposed to obtain spare-channel assignment, where a network-flow technique is used. Through a simulation study, a fast and economical self-healing network is verified