Fast Service Recovery Under Shared Protection in WDM Networks

In this paper, we investigate the problem of survivable routing of static demands in connection-oriented WDM networks with shared protection. We first discuss conditions and characteristics of a typical backup path sharing approach with respect to the average length of backup paths, and the values of connection restoration time. Next we propose a new method of sharing the backup paths, called SPGC, which is the first one that does not increase the length of backup paths (thus providing fast restoration of broken connections). The respective ILP model has been introduced. Owing to the complexity of the SPGC problem, an efficient heuristic algorithm designed for the general case of limited wavelength conversion capability has been also proposed. Extensive numerical experiments have shown that the proposed backup path sharing approach provides values of service recovery time which are up to 50% shorter on average, compared to the typical sharing technique. These results were achieved together with a significant reduction of the total link capacity utilization ratio of up to 40%.