Efficient path protection in bi-directional WDM systems

Bi-directional WDM transmission is a technique that allows data to be transmitted simultaneously in both directions of a fiber, with different sets of wavelength channels for each direction. Compared with unidirectional WDM systems, it not only saves the cost of deploying extra fibers, but also allows more flexible bandwidth provisioning. To exploit this flexibility, we investigate path protection schemes for bi-directional WDM transmission systems in this paper. With path protection, a call is accepted if and only if an active data path together with a disjointed backup path can be found in the network. With bi-directional WDM, backup resource sharing in both directions of a fiber is possible. Based on a set of judiciously designed link cost functions, two original path protection schemes are proposed in this paper, BiPro and BiProLP. BiProLP aims at further economizing the hardware cost incurred by BiPro. In contrast to the traditional unidirectional schemes, we show that both BiPro and BiProLP can yield noticeably lower call blocking probability, higher system capacity and shorter active/backup path length. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.