Performance evaluation of p-cycle based protection methods for provisioning of dynamic multicast sessions in mesh WDM networks

Network survivability is crucial to both unicast and multicast traffic. Up to now, extensive research has been done on unicast traffic protection. Recently, due to the rapid growth of multicast applications, such as video-conferencing, high definition television (HDTV), distance learning, and multi-player on-line gaming, the problem of multicast traffic protection has started to draw more research interests. The preconfigured protection cycle (p-cycle) method proposed by Grover offers fast speed in restoration (because p-cycles are pre-cross-connected) and high efficiency in resource utilization (because p-cycles protect both on-cycle and straddling links). So far p-cycles based protection approaches have been intensively studied for unicast traffic protection, but have been rarely investigated for multicast traffic. We propose to apply p-cycles to dynamic protection provisioning of multicast traffic, and evaluate the blocking performance in comparison to other existing multicast protection schemes. We consider three different p-cycle based multicasting protection methods, namely dynamic p-cycle (DpC) design, p-cycle based protected working capacity envelope (PWCE) design, and hybrid DpC and PWCE design. We show that p-cycle-based multicast protection approaches offer much better blocking performance, as compared with other existing multicast protection schemes. The main reasons for the much better blocking performance are attributed to the facts that (i) the selection of p-cycles is independent of the routing of the multicast light trees, (ii) there are no path/segment disjoint constraints between the selected p-cycles and the multicast light trees to be protected, (iii) the selected p-cycles are the most efficient p-cycles.

Automatic protection switching for p-cycles in WDM networks

p-Cycle recovery relies on a protection switching protocol. We detail several issues for such a protocol taking the evolution from ring networks to p-cycles into account. In particular, we propose and evaluate a protocol enhancement to provide means for node failure protection. For the evaluation, we describe an integer linear program, which is applied to network design case studies, and formulate availability models for p-cycles. The case studies show that the protocol enhancement improves availability at marginal additional design cost.     

Fairness of sharing protection for multicast in WDM networks

In this paper, the sharing schemes of multicast in survivable Wavelength-Division Multiplexed （WDM） networks are studied and the concept of Shared Risk Link Group （SRLG） is considered. While the network resources are shared by the backup paths, the sharing way is possible to make the backup paths selfish. This selfishness leads the redundant hops of the backup route and a large number of primary lightpaths to share one backup link. The sharing schemes, especially, the self-sharing and cross-sharing, are investigated to avoid the selfishness when computing the backup light-tree. In order to decrease the selfishness of the backup paths, it is important to make the sharing links fair to be used. There is a trade-off between the self-sharing and cross-sharing, which is adjusted through simulation to adapt the sharing degree of each sharing scheme and save the network resources.     

Achieving resource reduction for protecting multicast sessions in WDM mesh networks

The advances in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology are expected to facilitate bandwidth-intensive multicast application by establishing a light-tree, which regards the source node as the root, and involves all the destination nodes. The light-tree is sensitive to failures, e.g., a single fiber cut may disrupt the transmission of information to several destination nodes. Thus, it is imperative to protect multicast sessions. In this work, we investigate the problem of protecting dynamic multicast sessions in mesh WDM networks against single link failures. Our objectives are to minimize the usage of network resources in terms of wavelength links for provisioning survivable multicast session, and to reduce the multicast session blocking probability. We propose two efficient multicast session protecting algorithms, called Optimal Path Pair based Removing Residual Links (OPP-RRL) and Source Leaf Path based Avoiding Residual Links (SLP-ARL), which try to reduce the usage of network resource by removing or avoiding residual links in the topology consisting of light-tree and its backup paths. To evaluate the proposed algorithms, we apply Integer Linear Programming (ILP) to generate an optimal solution. We also compare the proposed algorithms with existing algorithms through simulation. Simulation results indicate that the two proposed algorithms have better performance than other existing algorithms in terms of wavelength links required and network blocking probability. Furthermore, the solutions generated by the two proposed algorithms are quite close to the solutions generated by ILP in terms of the number of wavelength links required, when the network size is small.     

Topology based placement of multicast capable nodes for supporting efficient multicast communication in WDM optical networks

Most existing algorithms for the problem of optical signal splitter placement or multicast splitting-capable node placement in a WDM network are based on the performance of attempting a large set of randomly generated multicast sessions in the network. Experiments show that placement of multicast capable nodes based on their importance for routing one set of multicast sessions may not be a right choice for another set of multicast sessions. In this work, we propose placement algorithms that are based on network topology and the relative importance of a node in routing multicast sessions, which is measured by our proposed metrics. Since a network topology is fixed once given, the proposed algorithms are essentially network traffic independent. We evaluate the proposed placement algorithms given static sets of multicast sessions as well as under dynamic traffic conditions, which are routed using our splitter constrained multicast routing algorithm. Our results show that the proposed algorithms perform better, compared to existing algorithms.     

A novel dynamic Multiple Ring-based Local Restoration for point-to-multipoint multicast traffic in WDM mesh networks

Optical networks with DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplex) can provide multiple data channels to supply high speed, high capacity to perform bandwidth-intensive multicast transmission service. Light-tree is a popular technique applied to support point-to-multipoint multicast services. Any failure during a multicast session would cause severe service loss or disruptions, especially when the faults occur near the source node. A novel ring-based local fault recovery mechanism, Multiple Ring-based Local Restoration (MRLR), for point-to-multipoint multicast traffic based on the minimum spanning tree (MST) in WDM mesh networks is proposed in this article. The MRLR mechanism dismembers the multicast tree into several disjoint segment-blocks (sub-trees) and reserves preplanned spare capacity to set up multiple protection rings in each segment-block for providing rapid local recovery. The MRLR scheme outperforms other methodologies in terms of the blocking probability, recovery time, and average hop count of protection path per session for different network topologies.     

Study of multicast wavelength arrangement for maximizing network capacity in WDM networks with sparse wavelength converters

The issue of wavelength assignment is one of the most important factors that affect the capacity for the deployment of optical networks. This issue becomes more critical for multicast connections, especially when the network nodes have no wavelength conversion capability. Although the wavelength assignment can be more flexible if each node can perform wavelength conversion, the deployment cost increases accordingly. A compromise is to support a limited portion of conversion nodes in the WDM network. We propose a systematic approach for the wavelength assignment of multicast connections in WDM networks with sparse wavelength conversion nodes. The efficiency of the arrangement of wavelength is measured by its influences on the available capacity of the network and the consumption of wavelengths. By using the proposed approach, the Static Cost Greedy (SCG) algorithm [8] can be easily extended to be applicable in a Sparse Wavelength Conversion Network (SWCN). In addition, instead of SCG, the Minimum-Effect-First (MEF) algorithm is proposed to maximize the network capacity during wavelength assignment. We compare the performance of the proposed MEF methods with the extended SCG scheme through exhaustive simulations. The experimental results indicate that the proposed MEF schemes demonstrate much better performance than the SCG scheme. We also found that the performance is not always improved proportionally to the increment of the wavelength conversion nodes. The improvement reaches saturation when the number of conversion nodes is above 35% of the total number of nodes.

Multicast wavelength assignment with sparse wavelength converters to maximize the network capacity using ILP formulation in WDM mesh networks

In general, multicast routing and wavelength assignment (MC-RWA) can be subdivided in routing and wavelength assignment issues in wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) mesh networks. Previous studies on WDM multicast have mainly focused on WDM multicast routing. The multicast wavelength assignment problem is studied in this paper. A unicast routing path can be established by a lightpath in an all-optical network. However, in the multicasting case, a multicast routing tree can be established by a single light-tree or several lightpaths, or a combination of several light-trees and lightpaths. We propose a wavelength assignment algorithm for finding an optimal combination of lightpaths and light-trees to construct a newly required multicast session. First of all, two cost functions are given to evaluate the establishing cost for each feasible wavelength, and then find a set of wavelengths that covers all destinations with the minimal cost using Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation. We focus on maximizing the total number of users served in a multicast session and the network capacity. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can improve system resource utilization and reduce the blocking probability compared with the First-Fit algorithm.This research was partially supported by the Grant of National Science Council, R.O.C. (NSC 94-2745-E-155-007-URD).     

Wavelength assignment with sparse wavelength conversion for optical multicast in WDM networks

This paper addresses the problem of multicast wavelength assignment for sparse wavelength conversion (MWA-SWC) in wavelength-routed wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) networks. It aims to optimally allocate the available wavelength for each link of the multicast tree, given a sparse wavelength conversion network and a multicast request. To our knowledge, little research work has been done to address this problem in literature.In this paper, we propose a new technique called MWA-SWC algorithm to solve the problem. The algorithm first maps the multicast tree from the sparse conversion case to the full conversion case by making use of a novel virtual link method to carry out the tree mapping. The method provides a forward mapping to generate an auxiliary tree as well as a reverse mapping to recover the original tree. Applying the auxiliary tree, we propose a dynamic programing algorithm for the wavelength assignment (WA) aiming to minimize the number of wavelength converters (NWC) required. Simulation results show that our new algorithm outperforms both random and greedy algorithms with regard to minimizing the NWC. Testing on various scenarios by varying the number of wavelength conversion nodes in the tree has confirmed the consistency of the performance. The primary use of the MWA-SWC algorithm is for static traffic. However, it can also serve as a baseline for dynamic heuristic algorithms. Typically, the MWA-SWC algorithm will provide great benefit when the number of available wavelengths on each link of the multicast tree is relatively large and the performance advantage is significant.     

An efficient mechanism for dynamic multicast traffic grooming in overlay IP/MPLS over WDM networks

This paper proposes an efficient overlay multicast provisioning (OMP) mechanism for dynamic multicast traffic grooming in overlay IP/MPLS over WDM networks. To facilitate request provisioning, OMP jointly utilizes a data learning (DL) scheme on the IP/MPLS layer for logical link cost estimation, and a lightpath fragmentation (LPF) based method on the WDM layer for improving resource sharing in grooming process. Extensive simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance of OMP mechanism under different traffic loads, with either limited or unlimited port resources. Simulation results demonstrate that OMP significantly outperforms the existing methods. To evaluate the respective influences of the DL scheme and the LPF method on OMP performance, provisioning mechanisms only utilizing either the IP/MPLS layer DL scheme or the WDM layer LPF method are also devised. Comparison results show that both DL and LPF methods help improve OMP blocking performance, and contribution from the DL scheme is more significant when the fixed routing and first-fit wavelength assignment (RWA) strategy is adopted on the WDM layer. Effects of a few other factors, including definition of connection cost to be reported by the WDM layer to the IP/MPLS layer and WDM-layer routing method, on OMP performance are also evaluated.     

On surviving dual-link failures in path protected optical WDM mesh networks

In this paper, we investigate the problem of enhancing dual-failure restorability in path protected mesh-restorable optical Wavelength Division Multiplexed (WDM) networks. Recent studies have demonstrated the need to survive simultaneous dual-link failures and have also provided solutions for handling such failures. A key finding of these early efforts is that designs providing complete (i.e. 100%) protection from all dual-failures need almost triple the spare capacity compared to a system that protects against all single-link failures. However, it has also been shown that systems designed for 100% single-link failure protection can provide reasonable protection from dual-link failures [M. Clouqueur, W. Grover, Mesh-restorable networks with 74 enhanced dual-failure restorability properties, in: Proc. SPIE OPTICOMM, Boston, MA, 2002, pp. 1-12]. Thus, the motivation for this work is to develop a hybrid mechanism that provides maximum (close to 100%) dual-failure restorability with minimum additional spare capacity.The system architecture considered is circuit-switched with dynamic arrival of sessions requests. We propose an adaptive mechanism, which we term active protection, that builds upon a proactive path protection model (that provides complete single-failure restorability), and adds dynamic segment-based restoration to combat dual-link failures. The objective is to optimize network survivability to dual-link failures while minimizing additional spare capacity needs. We also propose a heuristic constraint-based routing algorithm, which we term best-fit, that aids backup multiplexing among additional spare paths towards this goal. Our findings indicate that the proposed active protection scheme achieves close to complete (100%) dual-failure restorability with only a maximum of 3% wavelength-links needing two backups, even at high loads. Moreover, at moderate to high loads, our scheme attains close to 16% improvement over the base model that provides complete single-failure restorability. Also, the best-fit routing algorithm is found to significantly assist backup multiplexing, with around 15%-20% improvement over first-fit at all loads. The segment-based restoration algorithm reiterates the importance of utilizing wavelength converters in protection and is seen to provide around 15%-20% improvement over link restoration especially at moderate to high loads.     

ρp-Cycle based tree protection of optical multicast traffic for combined link and node failure recovery in WDM mesh networks

The extension of the p-cycle concept to tree protection enables p-cycles to protect the multicast traffic for combined link and node failure recovery. In this paper, we present an efficiency-score based heuristic algorithm of p-cycle based tree protection (ESHT). Simulation results show that the capacity efficiency of ESHT is close to that of optimal path pair (OPP) algorithm, while the blocking performance of ESHT is in between OPP-shared disjoint paths (OPP-SDP) algorithm and OPP shared disjoint segments (OPP-SDS) algorithm. However, p-cycle based protection approaches offer much faster restoration speed, because p-cycles are pre-cross-connected.     

Connection availability analysis of span-restorable mesh networks

Dual-span failures are the key factor of the system unavailability in a mesh-restorable network with full restorability of single-span failures. Availability analysis based on reliability block diagrams is not suitable to describe failures of mesh-restorable networks with widely distributed and interdependent spare capacities. Therefore, a new concept of restoration-aware connection availability is proposed to facilitate the analysis. Specific models of span-oriented schemes are built and analyzed. By using the proposed computation method and presuming dual-span failures to be the only failure mode, we can exactly calculate the average connection unavailability with an arbitrary allocation rule for spare capacity and no knowledge of any restoration details, or the unavailability of a specific connection with known restoration details. Network performance with respect to connection unavailability, traffic loss, spare capacity consumption, and dual failure restorability is investigated in a case study for an optical span-restorable long-haul network.     

Performance assessment of multicast node placement for multicast routing in WDM networks with sparse light splitting

This article examines all-optical multicast routing for wavelength-routed optical networks with sparse Multicast Capable (MC) nodes in two phases. The first phase is MC node placement and use of a simple and straightforward Maximum Path Count First (MPCF) algorithm to obtain candidates for MC nodes. The second phase is multicast routing with MC-based schemes that minimizes the number of wavelength channels with minimum transmission delay as required by a given multicast session, in that a light-tree is first constructed to connect MC nodes in a multicast group by using two algorithms, namely, the Pre-computing Minimum Cost (PMC) tree algorithm and the Pre-computing Shortest Path (PSP) tree algorithm. System performance of the proposed MPCF MC node placement algorithm is compared with that of the Normalized Cuts (NC) MC node placement algorithm for both PMC and PSP multicast routing. Furthermore, simulation results compare PMC and PSP multicast routing based on MPCF and NC node placement with Re-route-to-Source (RTS), Re-route-to-Any (RTA), Member-First (MF), and Member-Only (MO) multicast routing based on a light forest for a given multicast session in terms of average number of wavelengths needed, average blocking probability, and mean maximum transmission delay.

Dynamic establishment of restorable connections using -cycle protection in WDM networks

Dynamic establishment of restorable connections in WDM networks is an important problem that has received much study. We propose a dynamic restorable connection establishment scheme that uses p-cycles to protect a connection’s working lightpath. For a given connection request, our scheme first computes a working lightpath and then computes a set of p-cycles to protect the links on the working lightpath so that the connection can survive any single link failure. The key advantage of the proposed scheme is that it enables fast failure recovery while requiring very simple online computation at connection establishment time. Our scheme consists of three components for connection establishment: offline computation of primary cycles, online computation of the working lightpath, and online computation of p-cycles for working lightpath protection. Our scheme also includes a connection teardown procedure that computes and releases all p-cycles that are no longer needed. Simulation study shows that our scheme significantly outperforms an existing p-cycle-based dynamic restorable connection establishment scheme.     

Dynamic provisioning of low-speed unicast/multicast traffic demands in mesh-based WDM optical networks

This paper addresses the problem of dynamically provisioning both low-speed unicast and multicast connection requests in mesh-based wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks. Several routing/provisioning schemes to dynamically provision both unicast and multicast connection requests are presented. In addition, a constraint-based grooming strategy is devised to utilize the overall network resources as efficiently as possible. Based on this strategy, several different sequential multicast grooming heuristics are first presented. Then, we devise a hybrid grooming approach and combine it with sequential approaches to achieve a grooming scheme that is biased toward serving multicast traffic demands in comparison with all other sequential grooming approaches. To achieve our objective, we decompose the problem into four subproblems: 1) routing problem; 2) light-tree-based logical-topology-design problem; 3) provisioning problem; and 4) traffic-grooming problem. The simulation results of the proposed schemes are compared with each other and with those of conventional nongrooming approaches. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first detailed paper to address and examine the problem of grooming dynamic multicast traffic demands.     

Determining the maximum signal power in 10 Gbit/s WDM optical networks

Nowadays in optical networks there is a trend line to extend the maximum transmission distance. Several techniques are known; however, the simplest one is to increase the signal power in the optical fiber. The task of minimizing the number of inline amplifiers in order to increase the deployed system’s cost effectiveness leads to increasing the signal power. The only problem is the nonlinear behavior of the optical fiber which limits the signal power to be inserted into the optical fibers. In this paper, we present a model to calculate analytically the signal quality deterioration due to nonlinear effects at the receiver point. As a result, we give the exact value of the optimal signal power at the transmitter point or at the output of the inline amplifiers for 10 Gbit/s wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) systems.

Design of grooming architectures for optical WDM mesh networks: limited grooming with electronic wavelength conversion

In this article, we consider the problem of traffic grooming in optical wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) mesh networks under static traffic conditions. The objective of this work is to minimize the network cost and in particular, the electronic port costs incurred for meeting a given performance objective. In earlier work, we have shown the benefits of limited grooming switch architectures, where only a subset of wavelengths in a network are equipped with expensive SONET Add Drop Multiplexers (SADM) that provide the grooming functionality. In this work, we also consider the wavelength conversion capability of such groomers. This can be achieved using a digital cross-connect (DCS) in the grooming switch to switch low-speed connections between the SADMs (and hence, between wavelengths). The grooming switch thus avoids the need for expensive optical wavelength converters. Based on these observations, we propose a limited conversion-based grooming architecture for optical WDM mesh networks. The local ports at every node in this architecture can be one of three types: an add-drop port, a grooming port that allows wavelength conversion or a grooming port that does not allow wavelength conversion. The problem studied is: given a static traffic model, where should the different ports be placed in a network? We formulate this as an optimization problem using an Integer Linear Programing (ILP) and present numerical results for the same. We also present a heuristic-based approach to solve the problem for larger networks.     

A new approach for fast segment‐based protection in WDM mesh networks

We propose a new approach for developing segment‐based schemes for protection against single link/node failure in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) mesh networks. In the proposed approach, every request is allocated a pair of link disjoint but most coupled primary and backup paths. Two paths are said to be most coupled if they share the maximum number of end nodes of some existing requests. Coupled paths reduce the total number of hops need to be traversed by a failure signal and, hence, potentially reduces the overall recovery time. We show that the problem of finding a pair of disjoint and most coupled paths is NP‐complete. Accordingly, we propose an efficient and fast protection algorithm called SPXP—Segment Pre‐Cross‐Connected Protection, to allocate disjoint and most coupled paths. The proposed SPXP algorithm reduces the recovery time by ensuring that backup resources are pre‐configured along each backup segment and, hence, is readily available upon a failure. Simulation results for different incremental traffic models and network topologies show that, for most cases, the proposed SPXP exhibits better performance in terms of blocking probability, resource usage, and recovery time compared with existing protection schemes. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.