Resilience in transparent OPS multi-rings

This paper presents a resilient multi-ring network architecture based on the ECOFRAME technology. The network is made of two unidirectional transparent WDM optical packet switched rings, each with a separate control channel synchronized with one or several data channels. Two rings networks are interconnected by two adjacent nodes in order to ensure resilience. Such a multi-ring network is a suitable candidate for replacing the current SDH multi-ring metro networks, since it presents many features of a Transport Network. Contrarily to existing Ethernet rings or RPR networks, it is fully optically transparent within one ring, and may not access the client layer at interconnecting nodes. This feature allows provisioning client layers only at the edges of the network. A multi-class label-based MAC is proposed, in addition to resilience mechanisms for both unicast and multicast transport.