Network coding protection based on p-cycles for mesh networks

Network protection is very important to ensure the service continuity. However, most of existing protection strategies studied only the traditional dedicated protection and shared protection in which each traffic connection will be assigned to a primary path and a link-disjoint backup path to protect any single link failure and the consequence is that the backup resource redundancy and the traffic blocking probability may be high. To improve performances, this paper proposes a Network Coding Protection (NCP) based on p-cycle by performing the XOR operation for data packets traversing the network nodes, so that NCP can provide the protection for any single on-cycle link failure or straddling link failure. Simulation results show that, compared to the traditional dedicated path protection and shared path protection, NCP has better performances in protection recovery time, resource redundancy and blocking probability.