Fragmentation Aware, Resource Efficient Protection with Fast Failure Recovery in Transparent OFDM Optical Grids/Clouds

Due to high spectral efficiency and flexibility of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technology, OFDM based optical grids/clouds are fast replacing WDM grids/clouds. As grids and clouds process data intensive tasks, protection of optical grids and clouds from an arbitrary fiber-cut is extremely important. Employing a protection scheme leads to idle resource reservation and also data is continuously lost till protection (backup) paths become operational after a link failure. So, a protection scheme should not only minimize reservation of idle resources, it must also make the network recover quickly from a failure. In a dynamic scenario, another important issue is spectral fragmentation which leads to increased blocking of requests. In this paper, we address the problem of providing protection to OFDM based transparent optical grids/clouds ensuring fast failure recovery with minimizing of both resource consumption and spectral fragmentation to the extent possible. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to address the said problem for transparent OFDM optical grids/clouds. Performance comparisons show that the proposed polynomial-time algorithm Fragmentation-aware Resource-efficient Protection with Fast Recovery (FRPFR) improves bandwidth blocking ratio by 14.09%.