An online cost-efficient protection scheme for quick recovery in all-optical WDM mesh networks

Since a single fiber carries a huge amount of data in optical WDM networks, a fiber cut even for a brief period is a very serious event. Designing schemes to prevent disruption of user traffic and recovery techniques from failures is thus an important area of research. Since a single fiber cut is the most common type of fault, in this paper we address the problem of protecting all-optical WDM mesh networks from single link failure. Our proposed online protection scheme is an improvement over an existing approach and is not only cost-efficient in terms of network resource consumption but can also provide quick recovery from a link failure. We first provide an ILP formulation for the problem and then propose a heuristic solution iStreams that can provide near-optimal solution in polynomial time. Performance comparisons with some well-known schemes of protection show that our heuristic algorithm can be a better choice for conserving resource while providing quick recovery from a link failure.