Monitoring burst (M-burst) — A novel framework of failure localization in all-optical mesh networks

Achieving instantaneous and precise failure localization in all-optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks has been an attractive feature of network fault management systems, and is particularly important when failure-dependent protection is employed. The paper introduces a novel framework of real-time failure localization in all-optical WDM mesh networks, called monitoring-burst (m-burst), which aims to initiate a graceful compromise between consumed monitoring resources and monitoring delay. Different from any previously reported solution, the proposed m-burst framework has a single monitoring node (MN) which launches optical bursts along a set of pre-defined close-loop routes, called monitoring cycles (m-cycles), to probe the links along the m-cycles. Bursts along different m-cycles are kept non-overlapping through any link of the network. By identifying the lost bursts due to single link failure events only, the MN can unambiguously localize the failed link in at least 3-connected networks. We will justify the feasibility and applicability of the proposed m-burst framework in the scenario of interest. To avoid possible collision among optical bursts launched by the MN, we define the problem of collision-free scheduling and formulate it into an integer linear program (ILP) in order to minimize the monitoring delay. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and the proposed solution.