Fast Fault Localization in Optical WDM Networks

Optical networks are advantageous since they have high data transfer rate plus that the optical components are less vulnerable against electrical noise, however, they are very vulnerable against physical damages. Especially in WDM networks considering the wavelength division basis, an interrupt can cause a huge loss of information. This has made fault localization an important research topic in optical WDM networking. In this paper a new algorithm is presented which enables the administrators to localize faults in optical WDM networks very fast and it is very resistant against alarm errors. The method is based on establishing orthogonal vectors whose information can be combined by a Vector Model based algorithm in the form of a components matrix aiming at calculation time complexity reduction.