Switching link group Failure Localization via monitoring trails in all-optical networks

In this paper we investigate a novel monitoring trail (m-trail) approach, called Advanced Global Neighborhood Failure Localization (AG-NFL), which provides ultra-fast all-optical restoration for any shared protection scheme. In contrast with its previous counterparts, AG-NFL aims to identify and perform the proper switching action upon any single link failure rather than unambiguously localizing link failures. We identify switching link groups at each node, i.e., links whose failures do not have to be distinguished from each other, e.g., because the same switching action belongs to them. We prove that AG-NFL is NP-complete, and we propose a yet efficient heuristic to solve it. We demonstrate through simulations that localizing switching link groups instead of single link failures leads to a significantly improved m-trail performance both in wavelength resources and the number of required transponders, while signaling-free restoration is still provided.