Sub-path protection for scalability and fast recovery in WDM mesh networks

Summary form only given. In an optical wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) network, the failure of a network element (e.g., fiber link, cross-connect, etc.) can cause the failure of several optical channels, thereby leading to large data (and revenue) loss. A significant amount of work has been done to provide protection switching in ring topologies. As networks migrate from stacked rings to meshes because of the excessive resource redundancy used in ring-based protection, mesh-structured protection schemes have been receiving increasing attention. We propose a variation of shared-path protection called sub-path protection, which minimizes the total resource usage (in terms of wavelength-links), for a given traffic demand and area partitioning, while guaranteeing fast recovery time.