Performance enhancement for impairment-aware SRLG failure protection in wavelength-routed optical networks

With the increase of size and number of shared risk link groups (SRLGs) in WDM networks, path protection tends to have longer working paths and backup paths due to SRLG-disjoint constraints, which makes physical impairment a major concern in working path and backup path provisioning, particularly in large-sized all optical networks. As a simple and efficient algorithm, the working path first algorithm is often used for path protection against SRLG failures, where the working path is calculated first by using the shortest-path algorithm on the graph, followed by using the SRLG-disjoint shortest path as backup path. Compared with the working path, the backup path calculated after the working path in the working path first algorithm is more vulnerable to physical impairment, since it may be much longer than the working path. As a result, if we reject those connections that cannot meet the physical impairment requirement, with SRLGs the blocking probability of path protection will be much higher. We argue that impairment must be taken into account together with capacity efficiency in a comprehensive way during SRLG-disjoint working path and backup path selection. To solve this problem, we motivate the needs to study physical impairment-aware shared-path protection by considering two policies. Policy I uses two SRLG-disjoint least impairment paths as working path and backup path, respectively, and Policy II tries to benefit from both the shortest path and the least impairment path by choosing them intelligently. Analytical and simulation results show: (1) compared with impairment-unawareness, impairment-aware SRLG failure protection performs much better in terms of blocking probability especially with strong physical impairment constraints; (2) impairment-aware SRLG failure protection can significantly reduce physical-layer blocking probability; and (3) the algorithm based on Policy II achieves a good balance between capacity efficiency and physical impairment requirement.