Shared-Risk Logical Span Groups in Span-Restorable Optical Networks: Analysis and Capacity Planning Model

In an optical transport network distinct logical groups of lightwave channels between neighboring OXC nodes (called spans) may sometimes be realized over a common physical resource such as a duct or conduit, and hence share a common cause of failure. This is closely related to the concept of shared risk on individual channels or links, called SRLGs, which is relevant to pre-planned path protection schemes with shared capacity on backup paths. But when considering span-restorable networks, shared risk over logical spans (not individual channels) is the corresponding issue of concern. This work considers several aspect of how such shared-risk span groups (SRSG) affect the protection capacity design and other aspects of span-restorable mesh networks. We provide a model for capacity planning any span-restorable network in the presence of a known set of such shared-risk spans and study the relationship between capacity requirements and the number and placement of such situations. This provides guidelines as to how many SRSGs can be sustained before the capacity penalty becomes severe and methods to diagnose which of them are the most limiting to overall protection efficiency. One finding of interest is that if a given percentage of all possible dual-failure combinations incident to a common node are allowed for in the design, then nearly the same percentage of other dual-span failure combinations (any two spans in the network) will also be restorable. We also show that designing a network to withstand even a small number of multi-span co-incident spared-risk span groups will yield a significant improvement in overall dual-failure restorability and hence also in network availability.Presented at Optical Networking and Communications Conference (Opti Comm 2002), Boston, MA, USA, July-August 2002.