A novel distributed availability-aware provisioning framework for differentiated protection services in optical mesh networks

In optical WDM mesh networks, different protection schemes can be used to satisfy the service availability against network failures. However, in order to satisfy a connection's service-availability requirement in a distributed controlled WDM networks with no wavelength converters, we need a mechanism to select a proper protection scheme for each connection request while provisioning the connection. In this paper, we propose to use connection availability as a metric for providing differentiated protection services in WDM mesh networks. In the case of shared-protection, we propose a novel distributed parallel provisioning framework based on fixed alternative routing to select the connection's working and protection paths as well as the wavelength(s) at the same time by probing the k most reliable paths in parallel. The probing technique used in this framework is the first probing technique that probes each path as both a candidate working path and a candidate shared protection path at the same time. Based on the availability information collected, our provisioning strategy assigns an appropriate level of protection to each connection. The effectiveness of our provisioning approaches is demonstrated through simulation results.