Abstract:
With the frequent occurrence of fiber cuts in optical core networks and the tremendous loss that a failure may cause, the design of survivable optical networks is becoming of extreme importance to optical network operators. One of the major concerns in this regard is related to improving the availability of the services that the optical operators offer to their clients. This work addresses this issue by presenting three novel availability-aware protection schemes that achieve high level of availability for optical connections. As a distinguishing feature from existing protection schemes, the proposed schemes introduce relative priorities among the different primary connections contending for the use of the backup resources. In an attempt to gauge the benefit of the proposed protection schemes relative to the ones studied in the open literature, mathematical models are provided for evaluating the average connection availability resulting from the deployment of such schemes. The numerical results obtained from the mathematical models prove that higher availability levels can be realized through the use of the availability-aware protection schemes defined in this work.
