Tree-Based Protection of Multicast Services in WDM Mesh Networks

In this paper we address the multicast survivability problem of using minimum resources to provision a multicast session and its protection paths (trees) in a network such that the session is protected against any single-link failure. We propose a new 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. We study the performance of the SPT scheme in different traffic scenarios. The numerical results show that SPT outperforms the best existing approaches. It uses less than 10% extra resources to provision a survivable multicast session over the optimal solution and 0.2-4% lower than the existing approaches in the various traffic cases and has the average number of reconfigurations 10-86% less than the best cost efficient approach.