An Alternative Approach for Enhanced Availability Analysis and Design Methods in p-Cycle-Based Networks

We study the unavailability of end-to-end traffic in p-cycle based mesh networks, which are designed to protect against single link failures. It has been shown earlier by Grover and Clouqueur that the p-cycle length as well as its topology play a vital role in determining the availability of span(s) which are protected by the p-cycle. Similarly, we derive the relationship between the unavailability of a span(s) and the topology of the p-cycles) which is allocated for the restoration of the span(s). Based on these insights and on the fact that the end-to-end unavailability of a working path depends not only on the length of the restoration path but also on the number of spans along the working path, we try to design a method for allocating p-cycles such that the end-to-end unavailability is bounded by an upper limit and the upper limit can be varied as desired. As expected, results show that more capacity is required to guarantee a lower end-to-end unavailability. Our results also show that shorter service paths tend to use longer p-cycles than longer service paths, to obtain the same level of availability; this is expected since the path length, apart from the p-cycle length, also plays a role in determining the availability of the service path. We compare this formulation with a formulation which rather limits the hop count of candidate p-cycles to provide a lower end-to-end unavailability. We notice that directly limiting the end-to-end unavailability, as proposed by this paper, gives better results in terms of spare capacity redundancy than limiting the hop count of p-cycles. That is because the former allows shorter working paths to use p-cycles with higher hop count and therefore a better utilization of the allocated spare capacity