SLA-Aware Protection Switching in optical WDM networks

In this paper, we present a Service Level Agreement (SLA) constrained connection provisioning scheme, namely SLA-Aware Protection Switching (SAPS) that switches between segmented protection and sub-path protection with respect to the SLA requirements of the incoming connections. SAPS is an enhancement to a previously presented connection provisioning scheme, Availability-Constrained Generalized Segment Protection (AC-GSP), that works under shared segment protection. We evaluate the performance of these proposed schemes under resource rich and resource constrained network environments by simulation, and show that, SAPS improves the performance of AC-GSP in terms of the availability per connection, blocking probability and availability satisfaction ratio. However, it utilizes more wavelengths in comparison to AC-GSP since the more segments protect the links of the working path, the higher the network availability achieved. Therefore, in a resource restricted environment, blocking ratio of SAPS approaches to that of AC-GSP while still meeting higher availability values for the provisioned connections.