Dedicated protection scheme with availability guarantee

In this paper, a novel approach for availability evaluation is presented. In order to precisely capture the features of practical network operation and improve the accuracy in the availability evaluation, the dependency of network element failures is characterized by failure states (FS). For this purpose, a method that generating a failure state list for protection is developed and embedded in the proposed survivable routing algorithm such that the pre-defined connection availability can be guaranteed as simple as by protecting a single FS failure. Built on the availability evaluation a novel availability-constrained survivable routing algorithm, called Generalized Dedicated Protection (GDP), is introduced for circuit switched mesh networks. The proposed algorithm inherits the simplicity of dedicated protection mechanisms while offering the connection availability guarantee in presence of the network topological limitation that has been taken as the greatest challenge in the related research effort. Finally, extensive simulation is conducted to verify the advantages gained in the proposed GDP method compared with a number of previously reported counterparts.