Dynamic Establishment of Segmented Protection Paths in Single and Multi-Fiber WDM Mesh Networks

Wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) networks are matured to provide, scalable data centric infrastructure, capable of delivering flexible, value added, high speed and high bandwidth services directly from the optical (WDM) layer. But, providing fault-tolerance at an acceptable level of overhead in these networks has become a critical problem. This is due to the size of the current and future networks and diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements for multimedia and mission critical applications. Several distributed real-time applications require communication services with fault-tolerance apart from guaranteed timeliness at acceptable levels of overhead. Several methods exist in the literature which attempt to guarantee recovery in a timely and resource efficient manner. These methods are centered around a priori reservation of network resources called spare resources along a protection path. This protection path is usually routed from source to destination along a totally link disjoint path from primary path. This paper considers the problem of routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) in wavelength routed WDM optical networks. In particular, we propose an efficient algorithm to select routes and wavelengths to establish dependable connections (D-connections), called segmented protection paths. Our algorithm does not insist on the existence of totally disjoint paths to provide full protection. We present experimental results which suggest that our scheme is attractive enough in terms of average call acceptance ratio, spare wavelength utilization, and number of requests that can be satisfied for a given number of wavelengths assuming that the requests come one at time, and wavelengths are assigned according to fixed ordering. Furthermore, the results suggest that our scheme is practically applicable for medium and large sized networks, which improves number of requests that can be satisfied and helps in providing better QoS guarantees such as bounded failure recovery time and propagation delays without any compromise on the level of fault-tolerance for a given number of wavelengths and fibers. We conduct extensive simulation experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme on different networks and compare with existing methods.This work was supported by the Department of Science and Technology, New Delhi, India. An earlier version of this paper was presented at Opticomm 2002 conference, July 29-August 2, Boston, USA.