Intelligent p-Cycle Protection for Dynamic Multicast Sessions in WDM Networks

In WDM networks, it is important to maintain the survivability of communication sessions when link failure occurs due to the high bandwidth provided by a fiber link. Link failures have more serious impact on multicast sessions than on unicast sessions since a link used by a multicast session may carry traffic to multiple destinations. Thus, it is more critical to protect multicast sessions against single link failures. Researchers have proposed various protection schemes for multicast sessions, including tree-based, path-based, and segment-based schemes. Tree-based schemes suffer excessive use of network capacity, whereas path-based and segment-based schemes require long restoration times. In this paper, we propose a new p-cycle-based dynamic multicast protection scheme named IpC, which achieves both fast restoration and high capacity efficiency. The main feature of IpC is that it computes high efficiency p-cycles on demand to protect dynamic multicast sessions as they arrive. Extensive simulations have been conducted to evaluate the proposed IpC scheme, and the results show that it outperforms an existing p-cycle-based scheme.