Survivable multipath traffic grooming in telecom mesh networks with inverse multiplexing

We investigate the survivable traffic grooming problem with inverse multiplexing in next-generation SONET/SDH networks employing wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM). A key feature of next-generation SONET/SDH networks is the inverse-multiplexing feature. With support of virtual concatenation (VCAT), a connection of any bandwidth can be provisioned as several sub-connections (i.e., inverse-multiplexed) over diverse paths. How to efficiently protect and groom these low-speed sub-connections onto high-capacity wavelength channel, considering the typical constraints, is an important and interesting problem. We propose and investigate the characteristics of survivable multipath traffic grooming with connection-level protection in telecom mesh networks. Our results indicate that (1) the network performance can be notably improved by exploiting the inverse-multiplexing capability, (2) tight constraints have negative impact on performance, and (3) use of a single primary path after multipath failure is helpful to reduce the impact of constraints.