A novel carrier-cooperation scheme with an incentive to offer emergency lightpath support during disaster recovery

To achieve fast recovery of optical transport networks after a disaster, we investigate a novel scheme enabling cooperation between carriers. Carriers can take advantage of their surviving or recovered optical resources to aid each other through an emergency lightpath support, thereby efficiently reducing the recovery burden, which can be heavy immediately after a disaster. Such lightpaths can be exclusively employed by counterpart carriers to satisfy their highest-priority traffic demands, such as safety confirmation and victim relief. In addition, we introduce an incentive to carriers to promote such cooperation. The carrier cooperation-planning problem is divided into eight tasks and distributed to the individual carriers and a third-party organization. During cooperation, confidential carrier information can be strictly protected by employing a carrier optical network abstraction mechanism. The evaluation results indicate that our proposed approach can significantly reduce the recovery burden and corresponding cost to carriers, resulting in a faster and more efficient disaster recovery.