Survey and Performance Comparison of Dynamic Provisioning Methods for Optical Shared Backup Path Protection

Considerable current research involves comparison of different schemes for dynamic service provisioning to the established method of shared backup path protection (SBPP). But there are many possible approaches to SBPP implementation, so often it is not clear what the "best" algorithm is to use for an SBPP reference solution. Having found this problem in our own ongoing studies, we decided to conduct an up to date survey and study on various shared backup path protection (SBPP)-based survivable lightpath service provisioning methods. Methods are compared from the aspects of the operational complexity and blocking performance. The tradeoff between more detailed routing information and efficiency of protection capacity use is portrayed over the range of algorithms. For networks with full routing information, we find that compared to the well-known two-step process, an iterative route searching process can greatly improve the network blocking performance in a network with sparse topology. The "trap topology" underlies this effect. The study also finds that there are strategies of searching for working paths that improve the blocking performance relative compared searches structured on hop length. This paper is a shortened version of our survey study on SBPP service provisioning methods and considers only optical networks with full wavelength conversion capability.