Protecting multicast services in optical internet backbones

Many applications in the future Internet will use the multicasting service mode. Since many of these applications will generate large amounts of traffic, and since users expect a high level of service availability, it is important to provision multicasting sessions in the future Internet while also providing protection for multicast sessions against network component failures. In this paper we address the multicast survivability problem of using minimum resources to provision a multicast session and its protection paths (trees) against any single-link failure. We propose a new, and a resource efficient, protection scheme, namely, Segment-based Protection Tree (SPT). In SPT scheme, a given multicast session is first provisioned as a primary multicast tree, and then each segment on the primary tree is protected by a multicast tree instead of a path, as in most existing approaches. We also analyze the recovery performance of SPT and design a reconfiguration calculation algorithm to compute the average number of reconfigurations upon any link failure. By extending SPT to address dynamic traffic scenarios, we also propose two heuristic algorithms, Cost-based SPT (CB_SPT) and Wavelength-based SPT (WB_SPT). We study the performance of the SPT scheme in different traffic scenarios. The numerical results show that SPT outperforms the best existing approaches, optimal path-pair-based shared disjoint paths (OPP_SDPs). SPT uses less than 10% extra resources to provision a survivable multicast session over the optimal solution and up to 4% lower than existing approaches under various traffic scenarios and has an average number of reconfigurations 10–86% less than the best cost efficient approach. Moreover, in dynamic traffic cases, both CB_SPT and WB_SPT achieves overall blocking probability with 20% lower than OPP_SDP in most network scenarios.