Routing and design in K-shared networks

Fast shared restoration is critical to the success of WDM mesh networking. A restricted form of sharing called K-sharing was recently proposed, which allows rapid, signaling-free restoration. However, the routing and design algorithms used for traditional shared restoration do not work for this scheme. Also, K-sharing can potentially increase capacity requirements in the network because it limits sharing. In this paper, we present novel routing and design algorithms for K-shared networks. We also show that a practical version of the routing problem is NP-hard and present heuristics to solve it. We also summarize experimental results demonstrating that the additional capacity requirements imposed by K-sharing are in fact minimal in practice.