On the efficient use of multi-line rate transponder for shared protection in WDM network

This paper introduces the conceptual operation of a simple multi-line rate (MLR) transponder having two bit-rate options and thereby proposes a novel protection scheme based on rate-adaptive operation. The MLR transponder is proposed to operate at lower rate to handle working capacity and in case of failure event, it could be temporarily tuned to higher rate to support protection capacity. We formulate the network design with shared mesh protection considering our new proposal as integer linear programming problem. Extensive simulation over numerous traffic matrices and common network topologies are performed to investigate efficiency of our protection proposal compared to traditional approach in terms of total transponder count, cost issues and energy consumption.