Intelligent p-Cycle Protection for 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. Especially, link failures have more serious impact on multicast sessions than on unicast ones, making it more critical to protect multicast sessions. For this sake, researchers have proposed tree-based, path-based, and segment-based protection schemes, which however require long restoration time. In this paper, we propose a new solution based on p-cycles to address the problem. Specifically, we identify and address the challenges in applying p-cycles for multicast protection, and develop an intelligent p-cycle (IpC) scheme that forms p-cycles on-demand to protect dynamic multicast requests. Extensive simulations have been conducted to evaluate our IpC scheme, and the results show that it outperforms existing solutions.