Parallel distributed lightpath control and management for survivable optical mesh networks

Abstract

This paper presents a novel distributed protocol for online provisioning in survivable mesh-based wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) networks. This protocol examines each of the k link disjoint shortest paths as a candidate working path and as a candidate shared protection path at the same time, in parallel which gives the destination node the ability to apply an intelligent adaptive routing and wavelength assignment. Moreover, this protocol is the first distributed protocol can provision the working and the backup paths in parallel. We discuss in details a control and management techniques to set up and tear down connections and determine restoration capacity shareability in a distributed manner. Since only local information is maintained at each node, protocol scalability is guaranteed. The significant contribution of this protocol in terms of connection request blocking probability and connection setup time are discussed. We show through setup time analysis and simulation experiments the effectiveness of the proposed protocol.