Failure Location Algorithm for Transparent Optical Networks

Fault and attack management has become a very important issue for network operators that are interested to offer a secure and resilient network capable to prevent and localize, as accurately as possible, any failure (fault or attack) that may occur. Hence, an efficient failure location method is needed. To locate failures in opaque optical networks, existing methods which allow monitoring of the optical signal at every regeneration site can be used. However, to the best of our knowledge, no method exists today that performs failure location for transparent optical networks. Such networks are more vulnerable to failures than opaque networks since failures propagate without being isolated due to optoelectronic conversions. In this paper, we present a failure location algorithm that aims to locate single and multiple failures in transparent optical networks. The failure location algorithm developed in this paper can cope with ideal scenarios (i.e., no false and/or lost alarms), as well as with nonideal scenarios having false and/or lost alarms.