Operating mesh-survivable WDM transport networks

All-optical networks with wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) are considered to be a promising technology for next generation transport networks, as they can satisfy the growing bandwidth demand caused primarily due to an explosive growth of web-related services over the Internet. As the traffic demand increases, survivability becomes an indispensable requirement in WDM transport networks. This motivates the need for addressing failure restoration as an integral part of optical network design and operation. To date, the design problems have considered a static traffic demand aimed at optimizing the network capacity and cost, assuming various cost and survivability models. In this paper, we formulate three operational phases viz., initial call setup, medium-term reconfiguration when connections are blocked, and long-term reconfiguration to optimize resource utilization for the existing traffic, as a single Integer Linear Programming (ILP) optimization problem. This integrated framework is an attractive formulation that captures both capacity optimization and service disruption aspect in the problem formulation.