An analytical approach to shared backup path provisioning in GMPLS networks

As GMPLS and its supporting set of protocols develop into a viable control plane for optical networks, an important function that they will need to support will be the restoration and protection function that has been a major feature of legacy optical networks. Several models have been proposed for protection with GMPLS using shared backup paths. This previous work has not investigated the effect on recovery time (i.e. service interruption time) critical to the service or the number of backup paths that are required to meet a desired level of performance. Using both recovery time and recovery failure probability, we have developed a new analytic model for GMPLS-based recovery in M : N protection groups.