Survivability in Optical Networks: A Solution for the Wavelength Continuity Constraint Case

Survivability of internet services is a significant and crucial challenge in designing future optical networks. A robust infrastructure and transmission protocols are needed to handle such a situation so that the network users can maintain communication despite the existence of one or more failed components on the network. For this reason, in this work, we present a generalized approach to tolerate any set of failure scenarios, to the extent the user can still communicate with the remaining components, where a scenario corresponds to an arbitrary set of links in a non-operational state. To assess the survivability problem, we propose a joint solution to the problems listed next. We show how to find: a set of primary routes, a set of alternate routes associated to each failure scenario, and the capacity required on the network to allow communication between all users, in spite of any failure scenario, while satisfying for each user a specific predefined quality of service threshold, defined in the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Numerical results show that the proposed approach not only enjoys the advantages of low complexity and ease of implementation but is also able to achieve significant resource savings compared to existing methods. The savings are higher than 30% on single link failures and more than a 100% on two simultaneous link failures scenarios and in more complex failure scenarios.