Capacity-efficient protection with fast recovery in optically transparent mesh networks

Survivability becomes increasingly critical in managing high-speed networks as data traffic continues to grow in both size and importance. In addition, the impact of failures is exacerbated by the higher data rates available in optical networks. It is therefore imperative to address network survivability in an efficient manner in order to design and operate reliable networks. Transparent optical networks (TONs) provide several advantages over optically opaque networks for supporting the growing communication demands, but suffer from several drawbacks that reduce the efficacy of most applicable capacity-efficient survivability techniques. In this paper, we introduce a novel protection algorithm (for single link and node failures) called streams. The streams algorithm is similar to 1:1 dedicated path protection in terms of implementation and operation overhead, and has identical recovery speeds while requiring less capacity. We compare the streams algorithm with dedicated and shared path protection in terms of capacity requirements, path lengths, and recovery time. We also extend the flooding based mesh restoration algorithm (FBMR) in order to provide a fair comparison in online routing scenarios, and report the relative tradeoffs between the different algorithms. Our results show that dynamically routed streams offer attractive tradeoffs in terms of capacity, path length, recovery speed, data loss and implementation complexity.