Hierarchical self-healing rings

Traffic restoration in case of a failure in a circuit-switched telecommunications network involves finding alternate paths for all working paths that are severed by the failure, and rerouting affected traffic on these alternate paths. A new hierarchical self-healing ring (HSHR) architecture for circuit-switched networks is proposed and the design of HSHR networks is considered. A general cost model incorporating both the installation cost and the material cost is used. It is shown that the enumeration method, which finds the optimum configuration of HSHR, can only be used for small networks due to the complexity. Heuristic algorithms to find near-optimum HSHR configurations are presented. The routing and dimensioning of HSHR are also considered. Dimensioning of an HSHR is transformed into dimensioning of single self-healing rings inside the HSHR. Numerical results show that the performance of the heuristic is satisfactory.