Comparison of failure dependent protection strategies in optical networks

The criticality of survivable network design and operation increases with increasing transmission speed. Path protection strategies achieve better network utilization compared to link protection strategies; however, the recovery time of connections in path protection strategies are higher than that in link protection strategies. This paper evaluates and compares the performance of three failure dependent strategies: (1) failure dependent path protection; (2) link protection; and (3) Diversion—a variant of the segmented path protection approach. In addition, a framework for evaluating the connection recovery time is also developed. The protection strategies are compared for their recovery time and blocking performance using extensive simluations.