Differentiated QoS for survivable WDM optical networks

Optical networks based on WDM technology have become a promising solution to realize transport networks that can meet the ever-increasing demand for bandwidth. As WDM networks carry a huge volume of traffic, maintaining a high level of survivability is an important and critical issue. The. development of GMPLS switching technology led to the direct integration of IP and WDM. In these IP-over-WDM networks different applications/end users need different levels of fault tolerance and differ in how much they are willing to pay for the service they get. The current trend in network development is moving toward a unified solution providing support for voice, data, and various multimedia services. Therefore, it imperative that WDM networks incorporate fault tolerance to single or multiple component failures, protection bandwidth, recovery time, and recovery granularity besides resource utilization and call acceptance ratio. This article presents a survey of various methods that have been proposed for providing service differentiation in survivable WDM networks and discuss their performance. Such methods are broadly classified under various paradigms such as differentiated reliability, R-connections, quality of protection, and quality of recovery.