Measurement of Restoration Time from Single-Link Failure in an Optical Testbed Environment

Survivability is one of the most important requirements for an optical network. A single link failure in the network may cause severe service loss. There are several protection and recovery schemes proposed and implemented in the industry. It is very important to measure (or estimate) the restoration time in an optical network for a given protection schemes so that the performance degradation (packet loss, down-time, etc.) can be estimated. This paper presents a practical methodology for the measurement of the restoration time from a single-link failure in testbed environment at University of Ottawa Optical Networks Research Lab. (ONRL). The methodology is general, and can be extended to any practical optical network. Experimental results using ONRL testbed environment under various operating conditions are also presented.