Fairness-aware degradation based multipath re-provisioning strategy for post-disaster telecom mesh networks

Resource crunch, i.e., severe reduction of network resources caused by large-scale failures or drastic traffic fluctuations, represents a crucial concern for network survivability. Under resource crunch, simply relying on preserving large amounts of redundant resources to achieve network robustness becomes difficult or even impossible. However, reactively optimizing network resources and re-provisioning disrupted and/or existing connections might be a promising solution for disaster failures due to earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, malicious attack, etc. In this paper, we study a re-provisioning method for survivable networks, namely, a fairness-aware degradation based multipath re-provisioning (FDM) strategy to combat large-scale cascading and/or correlated failures in post-disaster telecom mesh networks (such as optical backbone networks). By exploiting policies of fairness-aware bandwidth degradation and multipath deployment, FDM exploits the potential bandwidth resource in post-disaster networks to maintain network connectivity and maximize traffic flows, while avoiding temporary interruptions of existing connections and balancing the traffic distribution. A mixed integer linear programming model and a heuristic algorithm, called FDM-i and FDM-h, respectively, are developed and applied in different scale test networks under various volumes of post-disaster traffic demands. Simulation results show that, with respect to some counterparts, the proposed FDM schemes achieve better performance in terms of connection loss ratio, traffic loss ratio, and fairness of traffic distribution and demonstrate a good trade-off between resource utilization and traffic distribution. Compared with FDM-i, FDM-h achieves similar performance and shows better characteristics on adaptability and scalability.