An online distributed protection algorithm in WDM networks

Failure protection and restoration is gaining significance as high capacity optical networks become increasingly ubiquitous. An important design issue that faces the network operator, lies in utilizing the wavelength sharing potential presented by non-concurrent failure events. In this study we propose a novel link metric and a set of routing algorithms that aim to maximally exploit these sharing opportunities. With the introduction of the light-weight aggregated link metrics termed "buckets", we provide guidance to construct the protection routes with minimal wavelength consumption. We show by simulations that our scheme significantly improves upon the baseline mechanism that lacks the proposed intelligence. We also extend the solution to a generic node-based approach, and show that further performance gain can be achieved by improving upon the way one applies our algorithms.