Mesh-Restorable Networks with Enhanced Dual-Failure Restorability Properties

We consider extensions of the most common mesh-restorable network capacity design formulation that enhance the dual-failure restorability of the designs. A significant finding is that while design for complete dual-failure restorability can require up to triple the spare capacity, dual failure restorability can be provided for a fairly large set of priority paths with little or no more spare capacity than required for single-failure restorability. As a reference case we first study the capacity needs under complete dual-failure restorability. This shows extremely high spare capacity penalties. A second design model allows a user to specify a total capacity (or budget) limit and obtain the highest average dual-failure restorability possible for that investment limit. This formulation, and a relationship between dual-failure restorability and availability, can be used to trace-out the capacity-versus-availability trade-off curve for a mesh network. A third design strategy supports multiple-restorability service class definitions ranging from best-efforts-only to an assurance of complete single and dual-failure restorability on a per-demand basis. This lets a network operator tailor the investment in protection capacity to provide ultra-high availability on a service-selective basis, while avoiding the very high investment that would be required to support complete dual-failure restorability of the network as a whole.     

A new proportional differentiation scheme based on batch scheduling for optical burst switching networks

Optical burst switching (OBS) is a promising switching paradigm for building the next generation optical internet. The proportional differentiation model is very convenient for network operators to quantitatively adjust the quality differentiation among service classes. To provide proportional differentiated services for OBS networks, a proportional differentiation scheme based on batch scheduling is proposed in this article. The scheme adopts the batch scheduling idea to reserve data channel resources for a batch of data bursts. It helps to decrease burst dropping probability. When some data bursts are unsuccessfully scheduled, a preemption method is used to keep a proportional burst dropping probability among service classes according to the expected burst dropping probability equations given by the proportional differentiation model. The scheme has low computational complexity. Simulation results show that the scheme can provide proportional differentiated services and efficiently decrease the burst dropping probability.

Availability analysis of span-restorable mesh networks

The most common aim in designing a survivable network is to achieve restorability against all single span failures, with a minimal investment in spare capacity. This leaves dual-failure situations as the main factor to consider in quantifying how the availability of services benefit from the investment in restorability. We approach the question in part with a theoretical framework and in part with a series of computational routing trials. The computational part of the analysis includes all details of graph topology, capacity distribution, and the details of the restoration process, effects that were generally subject to significant approximations in prior work. The main finding is that a span-restorable mesh network can be extremely robust under dual-failure events against which they are not specifically designed. In a modular-capacity environment, an adaptive restoration process was found to restore as much as 95% of failed capacity on average over all dual-failure scenarios, even though the network was designed with minimal spare capacity to assure only single-failure restorability. The results also imply that for a priority service class, mesh networks could provide even higher availability than dedicated 1+1 APS. This is because there are almost no dual-failure scenarios for which some partial restoration level is not possible, whereas with 1+1 APS (or rings) there are an assured number of dual-failure scenarios for which the path restorability is zero. Results suggest conservatively that 20% or more of the paths in a mesh network could enjoy this ultra-high availability service by assigning fractional recovery capacity preferentially to those paths upon a dual failure scenario     

Capacity Efficiency and Restorability of Path Protection and Rerouting in WDM Networks Subject to Dual Failures

Resilient optical networks are predominately designed to protect against single failures of fiber links. But in larger networks, operators also see dual failures. As the capacity was planned for single failures, disconnections can occur by dual failures even if enough topological connectivity is provided. In our approach the design of the network minimizes the average loss caused by dual failures, while single failures are still fully survived. High dual failure restorability is the primary aim, capacity is optimized in a second step. For WDM networks with full wavelength conversion, we formulate mixed integer linear programming models for dedicated path protection, shared (backup) path protection, and path rerouting with and without stub-release. For larger problem instances in path rerouting, we propose two heuristics. Computational results indicate that the connectivity is of much more importance for high restorability values than the overall protection capacity. Shared protection has similar restorability levels as dedicated protection while the capacity is comparable to rerouting. Rerouting surpasses the protection mechanisms in restorability and comes close to 100% dual failure survivability. Compared to single failure planning, both shared path protection and rerouting need significantly more capacity in dual failure planning.     

Flexibly Reconfigurable Fiber-Wireless Network using Wavelength Routing Techniques: The ACTS Project AC349 PRISMA

A dynamically reconfigurable fiber-wireless network using flexible wavelength routing techniques is proposed by the PRISMA project, which offers a forecast-tolerant solution for handling a wide variety of wireless services and capacity demands as may emerge in the fast evolving market of mobile communications. This approach can considerably increase the operation efficiency of wireless networks for broadband nomadic services (wireless LANs). It also supports the evolution from GSM and GPRS towards UMTS, and the entry of new operators and/or services into the liberalized mobile communications market. The system has been implemented in a field trial and has been operated successfully with real users and broadband nomadic services. The system concept is ready for further development into products.     

Performance evaluation of software-defined clustered-optical access networking for ubiquitous data center optical interconnection

In recent years, p-cycles have been widely investigated for survivability of WDM networks. They provide fast recovery speed such as ring and capacity efficiency as mesh survivability schemes. However, restoration paths are very long, which causes excessive latency and intolerable physical impairments. On the other hand, nowadays, a wide set of applications require an optical path with almost no delay. The existing approaches, namely loopbacks removal and inter-cycle switching, provide a significant reduction in the restored path, but even then a number of restored paths remain many times longer than the working path lengths. In this paper, we propose a network partitioning-based approach to control the length of each restored path as per delay sustainability of time critical applications. The basic idea of the work is to partition the network into domains and construct the p-cycles for each domain independently. The domain wise construction of p-cycles restricts their length, which consequently reduces the length of restored paths. Here, we introduce a new concept where the selected border nodes are overlapped among adjacent domains to cover inter-domain spans of the network as a domain span in order to ensure their survivability through domain p-cycles. Simulation results show that the proposed solution is good enough to control the restored path length with small augmentation in redundancy of spare capacity as compared to optimal design of p-cycles. More importantly, it enhances the dual failure restorability significantly.     

Dynamic bandwidth-allocation and path-restoration in SONETself-healing networks

This paper presents a new scheme for real-time bandwidth allocation and path restoration (BARS) in mesh networks via SONET wideband digital cross-connect systems (WDCSs) in response to demand and load dynamics and link and/or node failure(s). The scheme dynamically maximizes bandwidth allocation while ensuring full service restorability. Since the physical network capacity is limited, sometime not all the demand can be accommodated under the full restorability requirement. This demand in SONET BARS is rejected fairly at the network boundary even if capacity for allocation is available. Bandwidth allocation and fair demand admission are optimized jointly under the full restorability requirements. The implementation of SONET WDCS does not need excessive storage. An efficient parallel algorithm for solving the optimization problem is also presented. The algorithm produces superior spare capacity assignments compared to the results in the literature     

Modeling a Voice Network with Preemption

This paper describes the results of a study to calculate the grade of service (GOS) in a telephone network carrying two classes of traffic. When blocked, the higher class calls may preempt calls of the lower class. Two preemption disciplines are considered in this study. They are the ruthless and friendly search preemption disciplines of channels on interswitch trunk groups. The results of a computer model agree very well with a proven network simulator. The CPU time to determine the network GOS was reduced from hours to minutes.     

Incorporating QoS into IP Enterprise Network Design

Recent trends in enterprise networks are radically changing the composition of these systems. Instead of having diverse data networks, each of which is dedicated to a single class of applications, corporations are moving to a unified IP (Internet Protocol) Intranet. Traffic demands on these Intranets include delay-sensitive traffic that requires better than the standard best effort service provided by IP networks. As a result, various new technologies and strategies to provide end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) within IP enterprise networks are being developed and implemented. However, current IP network design methodologies are limited in that they can only design networks providing best effort service or else, a single delay constraint for all traffic. In this paper, we discuss a new design methodology for IP enterprise networks that takes into account the new technologies and techniques that can provide QoS. In particular, we identify and discuss the most crucial design issues that must be addressed when specialized queuing-based QoS strategies are used in the network. We describe the new constraints introduced by the underlying technologies and discuss how these factors affect the formulation of the IP Enterprise Network Design Problem. We then describe some specific features and methodologies that have been incorporated into a network design-planning tool for IP enterprise networks with QoS.     

Multilayer traffic engineering for multiservice environments

Multilayer traffic engineering (MLTE) serves to provide cross-layer online network optimization techniques to cope with rapid variations and short-term evolutions in traffic patterns. MLTE extends traffic engineering as it exists in IP/MPLS-based technology toward the multilayer IP/MPLS-over-optical transport network. In addition to the IP/MPLS traffic routing, MLTE exposes much larger adaptation flexibility by building on next-generation automatic switched optical transport networks. These offer fast setup and teardown of end-to-end multi-hop optical connections (lightpaths), which are offered to the IP/MPLS layer as dynamically provisioned capacity. This dynamic nature leads to an IP/MPLS logical topology that can be reconfigured on the fly, and IP/MPLS link capacity that can be up- or downgraded as client traffic demand varies. These MLTE techniques are generally used to increase perceived network performance in terms of throughput or QoS. As such, a MLTE-managed network offers a better than best-effort service. Many types of traditional and novel services are shifting toward IP/MPLS technology. Consequentially, MLTE algorithms and strategies should be conceived with the characteristics of such services in mind. We present a MLTE strategy that can be implemented in a robust and distributed way. This strategy is then taken as the starting point in a study which evaluates its suitability to such services. We show how the strategy can be adapted considering service performance metrics such as end-to-end delay, traffic loss, and routing stability, and how such service optimizations impact general MLTE objectives such as IP/MPLS logical topology mesh size reduction.

Risk assessment methodology for network integrity

Modern, high functionality networks support an ever-increasing range of sophisticated services; but this strength is also a weakness due to the fragility of the complex distributed-processing capability. Unexpected perturbations can cause widespread network outages, i.e. brownout. The risks to network integrity are exacerbated by regulatory policies that demand open network interconnection between competing network operators and service providers; and the increasing complexity where single experts cannot comprehend the whole problem space. This paper proposes a design methodology for a formal and systematic framework to assess the risk to network integrity and hence minimise network and service failure probability.     

Shared p-cycles design for dual link failure restorability in optical WDM networks

Pre-configured cycles (p-cycles) can attain high capacity efficiency and fast protection switching times in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks.This article proposes the weighted straddling link algorithm (WSLA) for generating a subset of all cycles that can guarantee 100% restorability in case of dual link failure, and give an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation that solves the shared p-cycles design problem minimizing the total spare capacities.Numerical result shows that our method can achieve 100% dual link failure restorability with acceptable spare capacity.The larger standard deviation of demand set and the larger node degree network, the better the shared p-cycles scheme performs.     

Service level agreement in optical networks

This article proposes a Service Level Agreement applied to the optical domain (O-sla), which is expected to be the near and long term network technology thanks, among other things, to the great bandwidth capacity offered by optical devices. After an exposition of the rationale behind an optical sla, parameters which could enter in thisO-sla, as well as their values for four classes of services, are proposed. Different client (wavelength or sub-wavelength) and services types (from leased wavelength to bandwidth on demand) are distinguished when necessary.     

Locally reconfigurable p-cycle networks for dual-failure restoration

p-Cycle reconfiguration methods (for instance complete, incremental, or dynamic-repair) based on the first event adaptive restoration model provide a promising approach for improving the dual-failure restorability characteristics of static p-cycle methods based on the static preplanned restoration model. However, if the reconfiguration process triggered by the first failure is not completed before a second failure occurs, p-cycle reconfiguration methods fail to achieve 100% dual-failure restorability and reduce to the static p-cycle methods which do not take advantage of the spare capacity to be reconfigured. In this study, we propose to use a new restoration model designated as first event locally adaptive restoration model with a coordinated re-restoration effort. This model is aimed to limit the reconfiguration scope to a local p-cycle where the spare capacity is only reconfigured on its straddling links for reducing the reconfiguration overhead (i.e., the average number of reconfigured links during the reconfiguration time.) According to this model, a two-phase locally reconfigurable p-cycle method is proposed. Only the straddling links of the local p-cycle affected by the first failure are reconfigured in the first phase. The second phase is not initialized until the second failure really occurs in the affected local p-cycle. The second phase is to enable the dual-failure restorations with a coordinated re-restoration effort for the first failed link from its original end nodes for any damage that the second failure causes to previously deployed restoration paths. The objective of the proposed method is to maximize the dual-failure restorability within a limited reconfiguration scope. We evaluate the correlation between the normalized spare capacity cost and the dual-failure restorability. The results show that the proposed local reconfiguration heuristic method improves the average dual-failure restorability of the 9n17s and Cost 230 networks by 45.1% and 20.1%, respectively, relative to the static p-cycles method and achieves closely the optimal value obtained using integer linear programming (ILP). Additionally, the spare capacity cost of the proposed local reconfiguration method is smaller than that of previous p-cycle reconfiguration methods in the two test networks.

A framing strategy for congestion management

A congestion management strategy for integrated services packet networks that is robust with regard to transmission speed and network size is proposed. The strategy supports several classes of services with zero loss and different delay bounds as well as services without stringent loss and delay guarantees. Loss-free and bounded-delay transmission is accomplished by means of an admission policy which ensure smoothness of the traffic at the network edge, and by a service discipline called stop-and-go queuing, which maintains the traffic smoothness throughout the network. Both the admission policy and the stop-and-go queuing are based on a time framing concept described elsewhere by the author (IEEE Trans. Commun., vol.39, Dec.1991). This concept is further developed to incorporate several frame sizes into the strategy, thereby providing flexibility in meeting throughput and delay requirements of different applications. Stop-and-go queueing is realizable with minor modification to a first-in first-out (FIFO) queueing structure     

下一代光网络的发展和关键技术

近年来，随着经济的发展和计算机的普及，Internet业务出现了爆炸性的增长，现有的网络应付大量的数据业务和各种类型的服务业务已显得有些力不从心。为了适应未来发展的需求，并针对IP业务的主导地位和光传输技术的发展，下一步不仅要提高传输链路的带宽和利用率，还要提高光网络的智能性，以满足IP业务对传输和交换系统的要求。因此我们提出发展以IP层和光层融合的下一代智能光网络（OTN）。并针对下一代光网络的发展和关键技术进行了简单的阐述。     

Evaluating the performability of tactical communications networks

Tactical communications networks are multihop wireless networks in which switches and endpoints are mobile nodes. In a tactical environment, system performance degrades when switching nodes and/or communication links fail to operate. Fast algorithms for performance analysis are desirable for optimizing the network in a timely fashion. Further, tactical networks commonly use preemptive priorities to achieve low blocking probabilities for high-priority calls when the loss of equipment in the battlefield is not trivial. This paper discusses three measures and analytical algorithms for the performability evaluation of a two-tier tactical communications network where preemptive priority service discipline is employed and traffic is divided into multiple classes to provide multiple grades of service. Each class of traffic has its distinct characteristics, such as average call-arrival rate, average call-holding time, and service priority. The three performability measures are devised to evaluate the impact of nodes/links failures on system performance. Experiments show that the preemption does provide robust service for higher priority traffic. The techniques for performability evaluation presented in this paper may also be useful in other rapidly deployable networks, where mobility, communication efficiency, and computational complexity for adapting the network to unpredictable environments are of significant concern.     

Design,Implementation and Evaluation of Programmable Handoff in Mobile Networks

We describe the design, implementation and evaluation of a programmable architecture for profiling, composing and deploying handoff services. We argue that future wireless access networks should be built on a foundation of open programmable networking allowing for the dynamic deployment of new mobile and wireless services. Customizing handoff control and mobility management in this manner calls for advances in software and networking technologies in order to respond to specific radio, mobility and service quality requirements of future wireless Internet service providers. Two new handoff services are deployed using programmable mobile networking techniques. First, we describe a multi-handoff access network service, which is capable of simultaneously supporting multiple styles of handoff control over the same physical wireless infrastructure. Second, we discuss a reflective handoff service, which allows programmable mobile devices to freely roam between heterogeneous wireless access networks that support different signaling systems. Evaluation results indicate that programmable handoff architectures are capable of scaling to support a large number of mobile devices while achieving similar performance to that of native signaling systems.     

Increasing the Link Utilization in IP over WDM Networks Using Availability as QoS

In this paper, we solve a mapping problem related to supporting two service classes that are differentiated based on their level of protection. The first class of service, called Fully Protected (FP), offers end-users a guarantee of survivability in the case of a single failure; all FP traffic is protected using either a 1:1 or 1 + 1 protection scheme at the WDM layer. The second class of service, called Best-Effort Protected (BEP), is not protected; instead restoration at the IP layer is provided. When a failure occurs, the network restores as much BEP traffic as possible, and thus BEP traffic does not receive any specific guarantees. The FP service class mimics what Internet users receive today. The BEP traffic is designed to run over the large amounts of unused bandwidth that exist in todays Internet. The motivation of this approach is to give carriers a mechanism for increasing the load carried on backbone networks without reducing the QoS received by existing customers. In order to support two such services, the logical links at the IP layer need to be carefully mapped onto primary and backup paths at the optical layer. We incorporate into our mapping problem a number of practical requirements that reflect constraints that carriers face and policies they want to enforce. For example, we allow the FP demand to be specified via a traffic matrix at the IP layer, we include an overprovisioning factor that specifies the portion of each link that must be left unused, and we incorporate a minimal fairness requirement on how the BEP traffic is allocated among connections. Our goal is to quantify how much BEP traffic can be carried in addition to the FP traffic, without impacting the protection quality of the FP traffic even in the case of failure, and without impacting the FP load. We provide two solutions, one is an optimal solution using an Integer Linear Program (ILP) model, and the other is an algorithm based on the Tabu Search (TS) methodology. Our heuristic algorithm allows us to solve this problem for large networks such as those spanning the continental US. We show that by having two such classes of service, the load on a network can be increased by a factor of 4–7 (depending upon the network). We illustrate that even with overprovisioning and fairness requirements (both of which reduce the total possible BEP load carried), we can still typically triple the total network load. We show that the location of the bottleneck can affect whether or not we see a difference in performance between 1:1 or 1 + 1 protection schemes. Our results illustrate the gain in terms of additional BEP load carried that can be obtained simply due to the upgrade of a single link. Our proposal provides carriers a new vehicle for generating revenue by extracting benefit from all the sources of unused bandwidth in networks.     

Location discovery in enterprise-based wireless networks: Case studies and applications

We have designed and implemented a Web service for location discovery (LODS) and a location-based printing service that usesLODS on a network with wirelessLAN connectivity based onIEEE 802.11 that is typical to campuses and enterprises. The need for location management and location-based services is linked to the mobility of the users. While location discovery is already implemented in cellular telecommunication networks since the system needs to know where are the users to connect them to incoming calls, the need for such a service was not so crucial in data network where in general the mobile user is the client and initiates the connections. We propose several solutions to implement our location discovery service depending on the underlying networking architecture and compare these solutions in terms of several criteria.LODS allows mobile users to find their approximate location within the campus or the enterprise and allows location-based applications to find out the location of a user to suggest the nearest points of interest, e.g., printers, elevators, and vending machines. We also present the case of our location-based remote printing service that was deployed in Purdue wireless network.