Hamiltonian cycle protection: a novel approach to mesh WDM optical network protection

Designing a protection scheme for a mesh WDM network is a challenging task. Extending the concept of the SONET self-healing ring in the mesh topology by using multiple rings to cover a mesh is inefficient in network resource usage. Mesh-based schemes can yield an optimal solution in network resource usage, but entails complicated switch reconfigurations when network element fails. In addition, mesh optimization needs traffic demands as input, therefore is not applicable to dynamic traffic. We introduce a novel mesh WDM network protection scheme-Hamiltonian cycle protection (HCP)-that is simple, efficient and applicable to dynamic traffic. HCP performs traffic grooming in spare resource space by consolidating spare capacity into as few links as possible, thus minimizing the number of spare switch ports and reducing spare link capacity. HCP can simplify the network recovery process by minimizing the number of nodes involved in switch reconfigurations and enabling the switch reconfiguration to be performed at coarse granularity.