DRAMA: Disaster Management Algorithm with Mitigation Awareness for Elastic Optical Networks

Elastic optical networks (EONs) have emerged as attractive candidates for satisfying the huge demands being placed on transport networks by emerging 5G and cloud applications. EONs provide high spectrum utilization efficiency due to flexibility in resource assignment. Because of their extremely high capacity, EONs need sophisticated survivability mechanisms and disaster management schemes to prevent or mitigate the loss of data in the event of failures and large-scale disasters. Traditionally, disaster recovery has aimed to recover the traffic impacted by the disaster by re-assigning alternate resources to the traffic. Such recovery can potentially affect all the traffic in the network, including that which may not be close to the disaster. We propose a new approach to disaster recovery in this paper, wherein a mitigation zone is defined around the disaster zone. In our approach, only the traffic within the mitigation zone is affected by re-assignment of resources to disaster-impacted traffic, and traffic outside the mitigation zone is not affected. We propose an optimization problem to minimize the penalty due to service degradation after a disaster, and present a heuristic algorithm named Disaster Management Algorithm with Mitigation Awareness (DRAMA). Simulation results show that DRAMA has better performance than a recovery algorithm that does not consider mitigation, and a simple algorithm without service degradation in recovery.