Survivability approaches using p-cycles in WDM mesh networks under static traffic

• Authors: Abdelhamid E. Eshoul;Hussein T. Mouftah
• Venue: IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
• Year: 2009

The major challenge in survivable mesh networks is the design of resource allocation algorithms that allocate network resources efficiently while at the same time are able to recover from a failure quickly. This issue is particularly more challenging in optical networks operating under wavelength continuity constraint, where the same wavelength must be assigned on all links in the selected path. This paper proposes two approaches to solve the survivable routing and wavelength assignment RWA problem under static traffic using p-cycles techniques. The first is a nonjointly approach, where the minimum backup capacity against any single span failure is set up first. Then the working lightpaths problem is solved by first generating the most likely candidate routes for each source and destination s-d pair. These candidate routes are then used to formulate the overall problem as an ILP problem. Alternatively, for a more optimum solution, the problem can be solved jointly, where the working routes and the backup p-cycles are jointly formulated as an ILP problem to minimize the total capacity required. Furthermore, only a subset of high merit cycles that are most likely able to protect the proposed working paths is used in the formulation. Reducing the number of candidate cycles in the final formulation plays a significant role in reducing the number of variables required to solve the problem. To reduce the number of candidate cycles in the formulation, a new metric called Route Sensitive Efficiency (RSE)--has been introduced to pre-select a reduced number of high merit cycle candidates. The RSE ranks each cycle based on the number of links of the primary candidate routes that it can protect. The two approaches were tested and their performances were compared.