Ant colony optimization based multi-faults localization mechanism in elastic optical networks

In order to withstand and recovery from multi-faults in elastic optical networks, we propose a novel multi-fault localization mechanism based on ant colony optimization and mixed line-rates. Multi-faults localization has been proved to be a NP-complete problem in wavelength switched optical networks, and all existing multi-faults localization algorithms require time that is super polynomial in the input size. Furthermore, multi-faults localization in elastic optical networks gets new features that the affected high-bit-rate services will play a greater role than the affected low-bit-rate services. In order to handle the mixed line-rates, we introduce the dependency metric which is used to describe dependency between alarms and likely causes. We establish the linear programming model for multi-faults localization and propose an objective function while considering the mixed line-rates. We implement the ant colony optimization based multi-faults localization mechanism on the stateful PCE-based multi-domain elastic optical networks test bed. The numerical results show that ant colony optimization based multi-faults localization mechanism has low flooding time and alarm packets, high success rate compared with the existing localization algorithms. We choose the best configuration of ant colony optimization based multi-faults localization by adjusting the parameters. (C) 2014 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.