FASTeR: Sub-50 ms shared restoration in mesh networks

Shared restoration is key to realizing the bandwidth savings offered by mesh networking. In order to be viable, restoration has to be effected fast, typically within 50 ms after failure. However, traditional schemes involve signaling and cross-connect (XC) setups that are too slow to be effective. In this paper, we describe a novel restoration scheme called FASTeR that dramatically reduces restoration times by eliminating these slow operations in either all-optical or electrical networks. The scheme involves a novel Select-Multicast feature of the XCs, and our experimental results show that a small multicasting degree is sufficient to achieve the savings gained under traditional shared restoration. Finally, we show that the generalized multiprotocol label switching (GMPLS) standard can be extended to support FASTeR.