Optical burst switching (OBS) is a promising technique for supporting high-capacity, bursty data traffic over optical wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) networks. An optical link failure may result in a huge amount of data (and revenue) loss, and it has been an important survivability concern in optical networks. In this paper, we study the fault- management issues related with a link failure in an OBS network. We propose to use pre-planned global rerouting to balance network load and to reroute bursts after a link fails. We apply optimization techniques to pre-plan explicit backup routes for failure scenarios. Our objective is to achieve optimal load balancing both before and after a failure such that the network state can still remain stable with minimum burst-loss probability when a failure occurs. We apply the pre-planned normal and backup routing tables to an OBS network, and study the network performance after a failure occur using illustrative numerical examples. The results show that the average burst-loss probability can be significantly reduced by 60% - from an average of 0.10 to 0.04 (when the normalized link load is less than 0.5) using globally-rerouted backup routes, when compared with the scheme without global rerouting. We also observe that the burst-loss probability is reduced by 43% - from an average of 0.07 to 0.04 (when the link load is less than 0.5) if the rerouting is done using optimization techniques, when compared with shortest-path routing.for Fault Management

As networks grow in size and complexity, both the probability and the impact of failures increase. The pre-allocated backup bandwidth, which has been widely investigated in the literature, may not be able to provide full protection guarantee when multiple failures occur in a network. In this study, we consider multiple concurrent failures where concurrent means that a new failure occurs before a previous failure is repaired. To combat the effect of multiple concurrent failures, new backups can be reprovisioned after one failure such that the next potential failure can be handled effectively and efficiently. We consider dynamic traffic where a pair of link-disjoint primary and backup paths is provisioned when a new connection request arrives. After a failure occurs, the affected connections switch traffic from their primary paths to backup paths. To protect against next potential failure, we reprovision new backups for connections that become unprotected or vulnerable because of losing their primary or their backup due to the previous failure or due to backup resource sharing. This approach is called Minimal Backup Reprovisioning (MBR). An alternative approach is to globally rearrange backups for all connections after one failure occurs, which is called Global Backup Reprovisioning (GBR). Backup reprovisioning can be performed whenever the network's state changes, e.g., (1) when a new request arrives, (2) when an existing connection terminates, (3) when a network failure occurs, (4) when a failed link/node is repaired, etc., to utilize the available resources more efficiently or to recover quickly from the next failure. In this study, we perform MBR or GBR after one network failure occurs to protect against the next potential failure in a wavelength-convertible WDM mesh network. The link-vector network model which can maximally explore the backup-sharing potential is assumed in this study. We then analyze the complexity of MBR and GBR under such a network model. A reprovisioning algorithm is proposed for MBR which can significantly reduce the connection vulnerability without the knowledge of the location of the next failure. In GBR, both integer linear program (ILP) and heuristic-based approaches are proposed. We compare capacity requirement and computational complexity of MBR to that of GBR through numerical examples. MBR demonstrates a good tradeoff between complexity and capacity efficiency to handle multiple concurrent failures

Optical burst switching (OBS) is a promising technique for supporting high-capacity bursty data traffic over optical wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) networks. A label-switched path can be established to forward a burst control packet (BCP) if each OBS node is augmented with an IP/MPLS controller. Such a network is called a labeled OBS (LOBS) network, and it can exploit the explicit routing and constraint-based routing properties supported in the MPLS framework to perform traffic and resource engineering. However, the burst-loss probability (denoted as BLP) can be large if the traffic is not properly engineered in a LOBS network, especially after a failure occurs. In this paper, we propose to use pre-planned global rerouting to balance network load and to restore bursts after a link fails. We apply optimization techniques to pre-plan explicit backup routes for failure scenarios. Our objective is to achieve optimal load balancing both before and after a failure such that the network state can still remain stable with minimum BLP when failure occurs. We apply the pre-planned global rerouting method in a LOBS network and study the performance of different rerouting schemes on some typical network topologies. Our illustrative numerical examples show that the BLP can be significantly reduced by 25%-99% (when the average link load is less than 0.5) using globally rerouted backup routes, when compared with the scheme without global rerouting. We also observe that the BLP is reduced by 20%-65% (when the average link load is less than 0.5) if the rerouting is done using optimization techniques, when compared with shortest-path routing.

As networks grow in size and complexity, both the probability and the impact of failures increase. The preallocated backup bandwidth cannot provide 100% protection guarantee when multiple failures occur in a network. In this study, we consider multiple concurrent failures where concurrent means that a failure occurs before the previous failure is physically repaired, and we present a comprehensive study on backup reprovisioning to combat the effect of multiple-link failures. The basic idea is to reprovision new backups for connections that become unprotected or vulnerable for the next possible failure, due to losing the primary or the backup in the first failure or due to backup resource sharing. The pros and cons of the backup-reprovisioning approach are extensively discussed. A generalized network model which can maximally explore the backup-sharing potential is assumed in this study. We then discuss the complexity of backup reprovisioning under such a network model. A reprovisioning algorithm is proposed which can significantly reduce the connection vulnerability without the knowledge of the location of next failure. The effectiveness of our reprovisioning algorithm is demonstrated through numerical examples.

This paper investigates survivable lightpath provisioning and fast protection switching for generic mesh-based optical networks employing wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM). We propose subpath protection, which is a generalization of shared-path protection. The main ideas of subpath protection are: 1) to partition a large optical network into smaller domains and 2) to apply shared-path protection to the optical network such that an intradomain lightpath does not use resources of other domains and the primary/backup paths of an interdomain lightpath exit a domain (and enter another domain) through a common domain-border node. We mathematically formulate the routing and wavelength-assignment (RWA) problem under subpath protection for a given set of lightpath requests, prove that the problem is NP-complete, and develop a heuristic to find efficient solutions. Comparisons between subpath protection and shared-path protection on a nationwide network with dozens of wavelengths per fiber show that, for a modest sacrifice in resource utilization, subpath protection achieves improved survivability, much higher scalability, and significantly reduced fault-recovery time.

In this paper, we present a connection-provisioning framework to satisfy customers' availability requirements using appropriate protection schemes. The framework contains two pats: (a) WDM mesh network service availability analysis; and (b) a connection-provisioning approach using the analysis. We present the availability analysis for connections with different protection schemes (i.e., unprotected, dedicated, or shared protected) and propose an integer linear program (LIP) based provisioning approach for static traffic. We verify the theoretical availability analysis through simulations, and demonstrate the effectiveness s of our provisioning approach using numerical examples.

We investigate the survivable traffic-grooming problem for optical mesh networks employing wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM). In the dynamic provisioning context, a typical connection request may require bandwidth less than that of a wavelength channel, and it may also require protection from network failures, typically fiber cuts. Based on a generic grooming-node architecture, we propose three approaches for grooming a connection request with shared protection: protection-at-lightpath level (PAL); mixed protection-at-connection level (MPAC); separate protection-at-connection level (SPAC). In shared-mesh protection, backup paths can share resources as long as their corresponding working paths are unlikely to fail simultaneously. These three schemes explore different ways of backup sharing, and they trade-off between wavelengths and grooming ports. Since the existing version of the problem for provisioning one connection request with shared protection is NP-complete, we propose effective heuristics. Under today's typical connection-bandwidth distribution where lower bandwidth connections outnumber higher bandwidth connections, we find the following: 1) it is beneficial to groom working paths and backup paths separately, as in PAL and SPAC; 2) separately protecting each individual connection, i.e., SPAC, yields the best performance when the number of grooming ports is sufficient; 3) protecting each specific lightpath, i.e., PAL, achieves the best performance when the number of grooming ports is moderate or small.

This paper investigates the characteristics and performance of different optical grooming switches, i.e., optical cross-connects (OXCs) capable of traffic grooming, under a dynamic traffic environment. We present four optical grooming-OXC architectures, namely, single-hop grooming OXC, multihop partial-grooming OXC, multihop full-grooming OXC, and light-tree-based source-node grooming OXC. After exploring their grooming capabilities, we propose three grooming schemes and two corresponding algorithms, grooming using auxiliary graph and grooming using light-tree. Through the algorithms, we evaluate the performance of different optical grooming OXCs in a dynamic traffic environment under different connection bandwidth-granularity distributions. Our investigation uncovers the following results: 1) the multihop full-grooming OXC can achieve the best network performance, but it may encounter cost and scalability constraints; 2) by using significantly less low-granularity electronic processing and intelligent traffic-grooming algorithms, the multihop partial-grooming OXC shows reasonable network performance and, hence, can be viewed as a cost-effective alternative when a network node does not require full-grooming capability; 3) the single-hop grooming OXC may cause a large amount of capacity waste and lead to poor network performance; and 4) through its multicast capability, a light-tree-based source-node grooming OXC can significantly out-perform the performance of a single-hop grooming OXC in terms of network throughput and network resource efficiency. From our results, we also observe that the connection bandwidth-granularity distribution has a large impact on network throughput and network resource efficiency and, therefore, should be carefully considered for network design and traffic provisioning.

We investigate the design of a WDM backbone network with optical cross-connects (OXCs) of different switching granularities to reduce the network-wide OXC port cost. We enhance our proposed graph model (Zhu, H. et al., IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking, vol.11, p.285-99, 2003), and the extended graph model can represent different node architectures in which a node may have multiple OXCs with different switching granularities simultaneously. Based on this model, we propose a provisioning algorithm for a single connection and a framework for network design, which can intelligently determine the type of OXCs at each node according to the traffic so that the benefit of different types of OXCs can be utilized. Numerical examples are presented showing that granularity-heterogeneous networks are more cost-effective than granularity-homogeneous networks.

As the operation of our fiber-optic backbone networks migrates from interconnected SONET rings to arbitrary mesh topology, traffic grooming on wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) mesh networks becomes an extremely important research problem. To address this problem, we propose a new generic graph model for traffic grooming in heterogeneous WDM mesh networks. The novelty of our model is that, by only manipulating the edges of the auxiliary graph created by our model and the weights of these edges, our model can achieve various objectives using different grooming policies, while taking into account various constraints such as transceivers, wavelengths, wavelength-conversion capabilities, and grooming capabilities. Based on the auxiliary graph, we develop an integrated traffic-grooming algorithm (IGABAG) and an integrated grooming procedure (INGPROC) which jointly solve several traffic-grooming subproblems by simply applying the shortest-path computation method. Different grooming policies can be represented by different weight-assignment functions, and the performance of these grooming policies are compared under both nonblocking scenario and blocking scenario. The IGABAG can be applied to both static and dynamic traffic grooming. In static grooming, the traffic-selection scheme is key to achieving good network performance. We propose several traffic-selection schemes based on this model and we evaluate their performance for different network topologies.

In a WDM optical network, the bandwidth requirement of a customer's connection can vary over a wide range, and many of these connections could have a capacity that is much lower than the capacity of a wavelength channel. Efficiently grooming low-speed connections onto high-capacity wavelength channels can significantly improve the bandwidth utilization and minimize the network cost. Our research shows that it is not necessary to have traffic-grooming capability at every network node. We call a network which has only a few grooming nodes to be a sparse-grooming network. Through proper network design and traffic engineering, it is possible for a sparse-grooming network to achieve similar network performance as a network which has grooming capability at every node. We investigate the problem of designing such a sparse-grooming WDM mesh network. The problem is mathematically formulated and several design schemes are proposed. Illustrative numerical results from the mathematical formulation as well as heuristics show that, by properly choosing the grooming nodes, a network with sparse-grooming capability can achieve good network performance and the network cost can be significantly reduced.

We employ a new, generic graph model for dynamic traffic grooming in WDM mesh networks. The novelty of this model is that, by only manipulating the edges of an auxiliary graph created by the model and the weights of these edges, the model can achieve various objectives using different grooming policies, while taking into account various constraints. Based on the auxiliary graph, we develop a dynamic traffic-grooming algorithm. Different grooming policies can be implemented by different weight functions assigned to the edges in the auxiliary graph. We propose four fixed grooming policies and an adaptive grooming policy (AGP), and our results show that AGP outperforms the fixed grooming policies.

In wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks, the bandwidth request of a traffic stream can be much lower than the capacity of a lightpath. Efficiently grooming low-speed connections onto high-capacity lightpaths will improve the network throughput and reduce the network cost. In WDM/SONET ring networks, it has been shown in the optical network literature that by carefully grooming the low-speed connection and using wavelength-division multiplexer (OADM) to perform the optical bypass at intermediate nodes, electronic ADMs can be saved and network cost will be reduced. In this study, we investigate the traffic-grooming problem in a WDM-based optical mesh topology network. Our objective is to improve the network throughput. We study the node architecture for a WDM mesh network with traffic-grooming capability. A mathematical formulation of the traffic-grooming problem is presented in this study and several fast heuristics are also proposed and evaluated.

We investigate the problem of grooming low-speed traffic streams into high-capacity lightpaths in a WDM-based optical mesh topology network. We study the node architecture for a WDM mesh network with traffic grooming capability. A mathematical formulation of the traffic grooming problem is presented and some results from mathematical formulation are also shown.