Protection algorithms for groupcast sessions in transparent optical networks with mesh topologies

Next-generation networks are expected to support traffic that will be heterogeneous in nature with bandwidth-intensive unicast, multicast, and groupcast applications. This paper presents two novel heuristic algorithms, namely Cycle-for-two (CFT) and Tree-for-two (TFT), for protecting groupcast sessions in mesh optical networks. The proposed schemes outperform other protection techniques that are mainly extensions of known multicast protection algorithms with the CFT heuristic algorithm performing the best amongst all of them.