Automatic protection switching for multicasting in optical mesh networks

Reliability in optical networks is a growing area of concern as high-bandwidth networks are expanded and interconnected. Even if robust operating conditions are established, redundancy is necessary to preclude catastrophic loss of data in case of failure of a link or of a node in a network. We shall give a brief overview of the common approaches to failure recovery, discuss the related topological issues and present a new approach to multicasting, which reduces topological constraints to a provable minimum.