Traffic grooming for survivable WDM networks - shared protection

We investigate the survivable traffic-grooming problem for optical mesh networks employing wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM). In the dynamic provisioning context, a typical connection request may require bandwidth less than that of a wavelength channel, and it may also require protection from network failures, typically fiber cuts. Based on a generic grooming-node architecture, we propose three approaches for grooming a connection request with shared protection: protection-at-lightpath level (PAL); mixed protection-at-connection level (MPAC); separate protection-at-connection level (SPAC). In shared-mesh protection, backup paths can share resources as long as their corresponding working paths are unlikely to fail simultaneously. These three schemes explore different ways of backup sharing, and they trade-off between wavelengths and grooming ports. Since the existing version of the problem for provisioning one connection request with shared protection is NP-complete, we propose effective heuristics. Under today's typical connection-bandwidth distribution where lower bandwidth connections outnumber higher bandwidth connections, we find the following: 1) it is beneficial to groom working paths and backup paths separately, as in PAL and SPAC; 2) separately protecting each individual connection, i.e., SPAC, yields the best performance when the number of grooming ports is sufficient; 3) protecting each specific lightpath, i.e., PAL, achieves the best performance when the number of grooming ports is moderate or small.     

Availability analysis under multiple link failures in WDM networks with shared-link connections

In optical Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks, different protection schemes have been proposed in the literature, namely, dedicated protection and shared protection. Shared protection techniques significantly reduce the required spare capacity by providing the same level of availability as dedicated protection. However, current mission critical applications (which heavily depend on the availability of communication resources) require connection availability in the order of 99.999% or higher, which corresponds to a downtime of almost 5 min a year on the average. Therefore, in order to satisfy a connection serviceavailability requirement defined by the users Service Level Agreement in a cost-effective and resource-efficient way, network operators need a systematic mechanism to evaluate the network availability under multiple failure scenario to ensure that current network configuration can meet the required availability degree; otherwise, a network upgrade is required. Unfortunately, under multiple failure scenario, traditional availability analysis techniques based on reliability block diagrams are not suitable for survivable networks with shared spare capacity. Therefore, a new concept is proposed to facilitate the calculations of network availability. In this paper, we propose an analytical model for evaluating the availability of a WDM network with shared-link connections under multiple link failures. The analytical model is also verified using Monte Carlo simulation. The proposed model significantly contributes to the related areas by providing network operators with a quantitative tool to evaluate the system availability and, thus, the expected survivability degree of WDM optical networks with shared connections under multiple link failures.     

Quality-of-Service Based Protection in MPLS Control WDM Mesh Networks

Intelligent methods for automatic protection and restoration are critical in optical transport mesh networks. This paper discusses the problem of quality-of-service (QoS)-based protection in terms of the protection-switching time and availability for end-to-end lightpaths in a WDM mesh network. We analyze the backup lightpath-sharing problem in such networks and study the correlation of the working lightpaths and the impact of the correlation on the sharing of the backup lightpaths. We present a multi-protocol-label-switching (MPLS) control-based fully distributed algorithm to solve the protection problem. The proposed algorithm includes intelligent and automatic procedures to set up, take down, activate, restore, and manage backup lightpaths. It greatly reduces the required resources for protection by allowing the sharing of network resources by multiple backup lightpaths. At the same time, it guarantees, if possible, to satisfy the availability requirement even with resource sharing by taking the correlation of working lightpaths into consideration. A simple analysis of the proposed algorithm in terms of computation time and message complexity indicates that the implementation of the algorithm is practical. The illustrative studies that compare the performance of 1:1, unlimited sharing, and QoS-based backup sharing algorithms indicate that QoS-based sharing achieves comparable performance as unlimited sharing, which is much better than the 1:1 backup scheme in terms of connection blocking probability, average number of connections in the network for a given offered load, and network resource utilization.     

A generalized protection framework using a new link-State availability model for reliable optical networks

This paper investigates a generalized protection framework for availability-guaranteed connection provisioning in an optical wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) network. Reliability is a crucial concern in high-speed optical networks. A service level agreement (SLA), which mandates high service availability even in the face of network failures must be met in provisioning a reliable connection. In this study, a new link-state-modeling mechanism is developed to form a dynamic link-state parameter called link and resource availability (LRA), which represents physical-layer availability and resource status for an optical link. Such up-to-date link-state information can be used by a standard link-state routing protocol to efficiently provision reliable connections. Based on the link-state availability model, LRA, a connection-provisioning algorithm is then proposed which can guarantee customers' availability requirements. A new generalized protection model is developed through dynamic LRA-based provisioning. Numerical results demonstrate the performance of the proposed provisioning approach to be promising.     

Survivable traffic grooming with non‐service‐interruptive wavelength retuning in a WDM mesh network

This paper proposes a new survivable traffic grooming wavelength retuning (STGWR) scheme in an all‐optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) network. In a dynamic WDM network, a connection may require a bandwidth less than a wavelength capacity. In addition, a connection should be protected against any network failures. Survivable traffic grooming (STG) can protect connections at subwavelength granularities. Wavelength retuning is a promising approach in an all‐optical WDM network, where a signal must remain on the same wavelength from its source to the destination, to alleviate the wavelength continuity constraint and reduce the connection blocking probability. Although both STG and wavelength retuning have attracted extensive research attentions nowadays, no effort has been made to combine these two promising approaches in one network. In this paper, we propose a wavelength retuning scheme with no service interruption in an all‐optical network with STG capability. The scheme allocates two routes, one for the active path and other for the backup path, in a shared mesh restoration manner to each incoming connection request and conducts wavelength retuning only on the backup path. Both wavelength retuning and mesh protection are done at the connection level instead of at the lightpath level. The simulation results of the proposed schemes are also presented. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A review of fault management in WDM mesh networks: basic concepts and research challenges

The article first presents a broad overview of the fault management mechanisms involved in deploying a survivable optical mesh network which employs optical crossconnects. We review various protection and restoration schemes, primary and back-up route computation methods, shareability optimization, and dynamic restoration. We then describe different parameters that can measure the quality of service provided by a WDM mesh network to upper protocol layers (e.g., IP network backbones, ATM network backbones, leased lines, virtual private networks), such as service availability, service reliability, restoration time, and service restorability. We review these concepts, the factors that affect them, and how to improve them. In particular, we present a framework for cost-effective availability-aware connection provisioning to provide differentiated services in WDM mesh networks. Through the framework, the more realistic scenario of multiple near-simultaneous failures can be handled. In addition, the emerging problem of protecting low-speed connections of different bandwidth granularities is also reviewed.     

Path-based routing provisioning with mixed shared protection in WDM mesh networks

In this paper, the authors focus on studying the problem of survivable routing provisioning to prevent single link failure in wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) mesh networks, and propose a novel protection scheme called mixed shared path protection (MSPP). With MSPP, the authors define three types of resources: 1) primary resources that can be used by primary paths; 2) spare resources that can be shared by backup paths; and 3) mixed resources that can be shared by both the primary and the backup paths. In the proposed protection scheme, each connection is assigned a primary path and a link disjoint backup path. Differing from pervious protection schemes, MSPP allows some primary paths and backup paths to share the common mixed resources if the corresponding constraints can be satisfied. In this paper, the authors consider three types of path-based protection schemes, i.e., dedicated path protection (DPP), shared path protection (SPP), and MSPP, and evaluate their performance for both the static and the dynamic provisioning problems. Simulation results show that MSPP outperforms DPP and SPP.     

A hybrid protection strategy based on node-disjointness against double failures in optical mesh networks

As the size and the complexity of optical mesh networks are continuing to grow and the severe natural disasters are occurring more frequently in recent years, multiple failures (link failures or node failures) become increasing probable. Protection strategies against these failures generally provision backup paths for working paths based on link-disjointness or node-disjointness. Compared with link-disjoint protection, node-disjoint protection means higher degree of risk isolation and can accommodate both link failures and node failures. This motivates us to propose a hybrid node-disjoint protection, named Segment and Path Shared Protection (SPSP), to provide 100% protection against arbitrary simultaneous double-node failures (the worst double-failure case). For each service connection request, SPSP first provisions backup segments for the working segments, respectively, as the primary backup resources, then provisions a single backup path for the whole working path as the second backup resource. In addition to its complete protection capability and flexible scalability for double failures, SPSP can also obtain better network load balance and resource sharing degree by dynamic link-cost adjustment and reserved backup resource sharing. Simulation results show that SPSP can achieve a shorter average recovery time than path shared protection (PSP) and higher resource utilization and lower blocking probability than segment shared protection (SSP).     

Physical layer performance benchmarking of two metropolitan area network configurations

This paper investigates the problem of dynamic survivable lightpath provisioning against single-node/link failures in optical mesh networks employing wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM).We unify various forms of segment protection into generalized segment protection (GSP). In GSP, the working path of a lightpath is divided into multiple overlapping working segments, each of which is protected by a node-/link-disjoint backup segment. We design an efficient heuristic which, upon the arrival of a lightpath request, dynamically divides a judiciously selected working path into multiple overlapping working segments and computes a backup segment for each working segment while accommodating backup sharing. Compared to the widely considered shared-path protection scheme, GSP achieves much lower blocking probability and shorter protection-switching time for a small sacrifice in control and management overhead.On the basis of generalized segment protection, we present a new approach to provisioning lightpath requests according to their differentiated quality-of-protection (QoP) requirements. We focus on one of the most important QoP parameters—namely, protection-switching time—since lightpath requests may have differentiated protection-switching-time requirements. For example, lightpaths carrying voice traffic may require 50 ms protection-switching time while lightpaths carrying data traffic may have a wide range of protection-switching-time requirements. Numerical results show that our approach achieves significant performance gain which leads to a remarkable reduction in blocking probability.While our focus is on the optical WDM network, the basic ideas of our approaches can be applied to multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) networks with appropriate adjustments, e.g., differentiated bandwidth granularities.     

Dynamic connection provisioning with shared protection in IP/WDM networks

Internet protocol (IP) traffic connections arrive dynamically at wavelength‐division multiplexing (WDM) network edges with low data rates compared with the wavelength capacity, availability, and quality‐of‐service (QoS) constraints. This paper introduces a scheme to be integrated into the control and management plane of IP/WDM networks to satisfy the availability and QoS required for IP traffic connections bundled onto a single wavelength (lightpath) in WDM networks protected by shared‐backup path protection (SBPP). This scheme consists of two main operations: (i) routing multi‐granular connections and traffic grooming policies, and (ii) providing appropriate shared protection on the basis of subscribers’ service‐level agreements in terms of data rate, availability, and blocking probability. Using the Markov chain process, a probabilistic approach is developed to conceive connection blocking probability models, which can quantify the blocking probability and service utilization of M:N and 1:N SBPP schemes. The proposed scheme and developed mathematical models have been evaluated in terms of bandwidth blocking ratio, availability satisfaction rate, network utilization, and connection blocking probability performance metrics. The obtained research results in this paper provide network operators an operational setting parameter, which controls the allocation of working and backup resources to dynamic IP traffic connections on the basis of their priority and data rate while satisfying their requirements in terms of bandwidth and availability. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dynamic Survivability in WDM Mesh Networks Under Dynamic Traffic

Network survivability is a crucial requirement in WDM mesh networks. In this paper, we systematically consider the problem of dynamic survivability with dynamic single link failure in WDM networks under dynamic traffic demands. Specifically, we investigate various protection schemes, such as dedicated path protection (DPP), shared path protection (SPP), dedicated link protection (DLP), shared link protection (SLP), and two restoration schemes, path restoration (PR) and link restoration (LR). Moreover, two new shared protection methods are proposed, i.e., SRLG-based shared link protection (SRLG-SLP) and SRLG-based shared path protection (SRLG-SPP). The SRLG (shared risk link group) constraint defines the availability of protection resources to a working path, which requires that any two working paths sharing the same risk of failure (or in the same SRLG) cannot share the same protection resources. Furthermore, in our study, we consider a more practical dynamic single-link failure model, in which the link-failure-interarrival time and link-failure-holding time are considered as two independent parameters. Based on this link-failure model, extensive simulations are done to analyze and compare the dynamic survivable performance of various protection and restoration schemes. Resource utilization, protection efficiency, restoration efficiency, and service disruption ratio are employed as survivable performance metrics versus traffic load, link-failure frequency, and link-failure reparation time to evaluate the survivable performance. Many meaningful results are given. In addition, we show that the developed SRLG-SLP and SRLG-SPP protection schemes perform very well in terms of protection efficiency and service disruption ratio, while sacrificing some performance in terms of resource utilization.     

Shared Sub-Path Protection Algorithm in Traffic-Grooming WDM Mesh Networks

In this paper, we investigate the problem of dynamically establishing dependable connections in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) mesh networks with traffic-grooming capabilities. We first develop a new wavelength-plane graph (WPG) to represent the current state of the network. We then propose a dynamic shared sub-path protection (SSPP) scheme based on this WPG. To establish a dependable connection, SSPP first searches a primary path for each connection request, and then it segments the found path into several equal-length sub-paths, and computes their corresponding backup paths, respectively. If two sub-paths in SSPP are fiber-disjoint then their backup paths can share backup resources to obtain optimal spare capacity. Based on dynamic traffic with different load, the performance of SSPP has been investigated via simulations. The results show that SSPP can make the tradeoffs between resource utilization and restoration time.     

On the improvement of network resource utilization efficiency for the establishment of static dependable connections in SRLG-constrained WDM translucent networks

In this paper, we investigate the problem of establishing static connections with fault-tolerant requirements, also known as dependable connections, taking into account quality of transmission constraints. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that tackles the aforementioned problem under shared risk link group (SRLG) constraints in translucent WDM optical mesh networks where typically a set of strategically localized network nodes are equipped with regeneration capability to overcome physical-layer impairment effects. A novel cross-layer heuristic approach is introduced to solve the problem for an heterogeneous networked scenario relying on a cost-effective two-stage protection procedure which combines the well-known path protection and partial path protection schemes in order to ensure instantaneous recovery from any SRLG-failure event. The proposed heuristic integrates a generic auxiliary graph model that incorporates various network heterogeneity factors such as the number of transceivers at each network node, the number of wavelengths on each fiber link, and the regeneration capability of each node, represented by different edges in the constructed graph. Moreover, the integrated auxiliary graph can be applied efficiently to model either single- or mixed-line-rate translucent WDM optical networks wherein different modulation formats are employed in order to support the transmission at different line rates. Our solution approach aims at maximizing the total number of accommodated requests by reducing network resource consumption through the simultaneous use of the backup–backup and primary–backup multiplexing techniques. We, here, present extended versions of these two techniques that generalize the sharing concept to some other important node resources—specifically, regeneration equipments which constitute the major cost factor in optical transport networks—in addition to link resources (i.e., wavelength channels). As far as we know, this is the first attempt to deploy simultaneously generalized versions of the backup–backup and primary–backup multiplexing techniques when considering static traffic patterns without compromising the 100 % fault-recoverability guarantee. The performances of the proposed heuristic are evaluated and discussed through extensive numerical experiments carried out on different network topologies. Significant improvements are demonstrated, either in terms of network blocking performance or in terms of resource utilization efficiency, in comparison with previously proposed approaches.     

Reliable Multipath Provisioning for High-Capacity Backbone Mesh Networks

We investigate reliable multipath provisioning of traffic in high-capacity backbone mesh networks, e.g., next-generation SONET/SDH networks supporting virtual concatenation (VCAT). VCAT enables a connection to be inversely multiplexed on to multiple paths, a feature that may lead to significantly improved performance over conventional single-path provisioning. Other mesh networks such as those employing optical wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) can also benefit from this multipath provisioning approach. We propose effective multipath bandwidth as the metric to provision a connection while satisfying its reliability requirements (measured in terms of availability). We demonstrate that effective multipath bandwidth provides more flexibility and lower blocking probability without the cost and the complexity associated with traditional protection schemes developed for optical WDM and MPLS networks. We also investigate the practical problem of provisioning effective multipath bandwidth with cost constraints. We analyze the tractability of the problem and present a heuristic which results in significantly reduced number of blocked connections due to cost constraints.     

Survivable lightpath provisioning in WDM mesh networks under shared path protection and signal quality constraints

This paper addresses the problem of survivable lightpath provisioning in wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) mesh networks, taking into consideration optical-layer protection and some realistic optical signal quality constraints. The investigated networks use sparsely placed optical-electrical-optical (O/E/O) modules for regeneration and wavelength conversion. Given a fixed network topology with a number of sparsely placed O/E/O modules and a set of connection requests, a pair of link-disjoint lightpaths is established for each connection. Due to physical impairments and wavelength continuity, both the working and protection lightpaths need to be regenerated at some intermediate nodes to overcome signal quality degradation and wavelength contention. In the present paper, resource-efficient provisioning solutions are achieved with the objective of maximizing resource sharing. The authors propose a resource-sharing scheme that supports three kinds of resource-sharing scenarios, including a conventional wavelength-link sharing scenario, which shares wavelength links between protection lightpaths, and two new scenarios, which share O/E/O modules between protection lightpaths and between working and protection lightpaths. An integer linear programming (ILP)-based solution approach is used to find optimal solutions. The authors also propose a local optimization heuristic approach and a tabu search heuristic approach to solve this problem for real-world, large mesh networks. Numerical results show that our solution approaches work well under a variety of network settings and achieves a high level of resource-sharing rates (over 60% for O/E/O modules and over 30% for wavelength links), which translate into great savings in network costs.     

A novel fault management approach for DWDM optical networks

Connection availability is considered as a critical metric when providing differentiated services in Wavelength‐Division Multiplexing mesh networks. Indeed, one of the major concerns of optical network operators is related to improving the availability of services provided to their highest‐class clients. Achieving this objective is possible through managing faults using the different classical protection schemes, namely the so‐called dedicated and shared protection schemes. However, the majority of the work concerning protection schemes has considered the primary connections as equally important when contending for the use of the backup resources. As a main contribution in this paper, we therefore propose an improvement of the existing protection schemes through the introduction of relative priorities among the different primary connections contending for the access to the protection path. To evaluate numerically the benefits of the service differentiation feature introduced in our proposal, we first develop a mathematical model, based on which we derive explicit expressions for the average connection availabilities that result from both the classical protection schemes and the proposed priority‐aware one. Through this model, we show how the availability of the highest‐class clients is improved when deploying the proposed priority‐aware protection scheme. Finally, with the same objective in mind, we develop a simulation study, where a given set of connection demands with predefined availability requirements is provisioned using different protection strategies. Through this study, we show that the priority‐aware protection strategy satisfies service‐availability requirements in a cost‐effective manner compared with the classical protection schemes.Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hybrid survivability approaches for optical WDM mesh networks

This paper studies the problem of providing recovery from link failures in optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks. One of the widely studied mechanisms is dynamic link restoration, which provides recovery by determining restoration paths around a link after a failure occurs. This mechanism leads to a lower backup resource utilization, fast failure signaling rate, and a scalable operation. However, one of the main drawbacks of uncoordinated dynamic restoration is the inability to provide a 100% recovery for all connections, especially at high network loads. An alternate solution is proactive protection, where backup capacity is reserved during connection setup that can guarantee recovery under certain conditions (e.g., single link failures) but requires higher backup capacity and has low spare capacity utilization when failures do not occur. This paper presents two hybrid survivability approaches that combine the positive effects of restoration and protection. The proposed algorithms make use of available or collected network state information, such as link load, to identify critical links or segments in the network that are then proactively protected. The overall goal of the proposed approaches is to improve the restoration efficiency by providing a tradeoff between proactive protection and dynamic restoration. This paper presents a detailed performance analysis of the proposed algorithms. Experimental results show that under high loads, both the proposed approaches maintain a consistent restoration efficiency of at least 10%, or higher, when compared to the basic restoration scheme.     

A Framework for Differentiated Survivable Optical Virtual Private Networks

Wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) networks are matured to provide, scalable data centric infrastructure, capable of delivering flexible, value added, high speed and high bandwidth services directly from the optical domain. Optical virtual private networks (OVPNs) make use of the concept of highly reconfigurable nature of lightpaths offered by WDM, to create secure tunnels of high bandwidth across the intelligent WDM optical transport network. An OVPN is a private connection between two or more edge devices (access nodes), that allows a group of clients to fully exploit the flexibility of the switched intelligent optical network. However, OVPNs will not be a viable alternative unless they can guarantee a predictable bandwidth, availability, response time, and fault-tolerance to users. In this paper, we study the problem of dynamically establishing lightpaths for OVPNs over intelligent optical transport networks to provide varying classes of service based on the type of primary and backup lightpaths and the number of backup lightpaths, when each OVPN is specified by the desired logical connectivity and Class of Service. The type of primary and backup lightpaths determines the QoS parameters such as response time and bandwidth. Whereas, the number of backup lightpaths determines the level of fault-tolerance and availability of OVPN. Based on the service classes, any OVPN in the network falls into one of the six classes viz. single dedicated primary and single dedicated backup (SDPSDB), single dedicated primary and multiple dedicated backups (SDPMDB), single dedicated primary and single shared backup (SDPSSB), single shared primary and single shared backup (SSPSSB), single shared primary and multiple shared backups (SSPMSB), and best-effort (BE). In BE, we consider two variations—(1) OVPN as dedicated logical ring topology (DLRT) and (2) OVPN as shared logical ring topology (SLRT). We conduct extensive simulation experiments to compare and evaluate the effectiveness of different classes of OVPNs for varying network configurations–varying number of fibers, wavelengths on physical links, and number of nodes in OVPN.     

Capacity planning providing 100 % survivability against double-link failures for WDM Networks

Survivability is always a key concern in WDM optical transport networks as failures may result in large amount of traffic disruption and significant degradation of network performance. In this paper, we investigate the capacity planning problem against double-link failures considering wavelength—continuity constraint. Our objective is to minimize the resource consumption when guaranteeing connection request 100 % survivability. We propose two efficient approaches: (1) the New Static Preplanned Path Protection (NSPPP); (2) the New Dynamic Rerouting (NDR). In NSPPP, we present a new backup resource sharing rule to compress the spare capacity. In NDR, only the working path of connection request is necessary to be given, and the rerouting path can be dynamically found on the network after double-link failures. Compared to previous algorithms, our proposed two capacity planning approaches can efficiently solve double-link failures problem of WDM networks, also obtain higher resource utilization ratio and lower network resource.     

Survivable WDM mesh networks

In a wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) optical network, the failure of network elements (e.g., fiber links and cross connects) may cause the failure of several optical channels, thereby leading to large data losses. This study examines different approaches to protect a mesh-based WDM optical network from such failures. These approaches are based on two survivability paradigms: 1) path protection/restoration and 2) link protection/restoration. The study examines the wavelength capacity requirements, and routing and wavelength assignment of primary and backup paths for path and link protection and proposes distributed protocols for path and link restoration. The study also examines the protection-switching time and the restoration time for each of these schemes, and the susceptibility of these schemes to multiple link failures. The numerical results obtained for a representative network topology with random traffic demands demonstrate that there is a tradeoff between the capacity utilization and the susceptibility to multiple link failures. We find that, on one hand, path protection provides significant capacity savings over link protection, and shared protection provides significant savings over dedicated protection; while on the other hand, path protection is more susceptible to multiple link failures than link protection, and shared protection is more susceptible to multiple link failures than dedicated protection. We formulate a model of protection-switching times for the different protection schemes based on a fully distributed control network. We propose distributed control protocols for path and link restoration. Numerical results obtained by simulating these protocols indicate that, for a representative network topology, path restoration has a better restoration efficiency than link restoration, and link restoration has a faster restoration time compared with path restoration.