Toward efficient multi-link failure diagnosis by using monitoring cycle for all-optical mesh networks

As node failure in simple graphical networks is the target of most studies on network failure diagnostic mechanisms until now, and the one-way transmission characteristic of optical fibers is often overlooked. For this, our study assumes that two directed optical fiber links which are in opposite direction to each other are placed to connect any two neighboring nodes in an all-optical mesh network (AONs) instead of the use of merely a single undirected link between them. The network architecture formed in this manner can be viewed as a bi-directional topology which better reflects the configuration facts and the establishment requirements on metro-edge fiber-optic networks. Based on this assumption, for the cost-effective objective, a monitor selection method is proposed in our work to select fewer monitors to do the link failure diagnosis job. Combined with the method and bi-directional topology concept, and with the aid of healthy information extracted from the network normal parts during fault(s), our multi-link failure diagnostic mechanism is developed and capable of providing high-precision diagnostic results. In addition, to increase the practicability of our network failure diagnostic mechanism, we further adapt our mechanism to more complex networking environment and situations, e.g., occurrence of multiple simultaneous faults in a metro-core mesh networks. The performance evaluation reveals our mechanism can function equally well even with large and complex graphical networks.