Holding-time-aware and availability-guaranteed connection provisioning in optical WDM mesh networks

In optical wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) networks, the progress in new technologies is paving the road towards dynamic optical transport networks in which leasable circuits can be set up and released on a short-term basis while providing huge capacities to bandwidth-hungry applications. Since interruption of a high-speed optical connection means a huge loss of data information, such connections need to be protected against failures. On the other hand, the explosive growth of different traffic types such as data, voice and video requires differentiated services besides availability-guaranteed bandwidth. Therefore, future network carriers need to meet strict SLA (service level agreement) guidelines, thus guaranteeing a level of service, as well as achieving efficient resource utilization. Unprotected, shared-path, and dedicated-path protection techniques can be used to meet the differentiated availability requirements. Recently, among the other service level specifications (SLSs), many new applications are identified by a predictable or known-in-advance holding-time. So, for dynamic provisioning of availability-guaranteed connections in an optical mesh network, we investigate a new algorithm which exploits the knowledge of connection holding times to accomplish minimum backup capacity allocation as compared to the previous holding-time-unaware approach.