On Signaling-Free Failure Dependent Restoration in All-Optical Mesh Networks

Failure dependent protection (FDP) is known to achieve optimal capacity efficiency among all types of protection, at the expense of longer recovery time and more complicated signaling overhead. This particularly hinders the usage of FDP in all-optical mesh networks. As a remedy, this paper investigates a new restoration framework that enables all-optical fault management and device configuration via state-of-the-art failure localization techniques, such as the FDP restoration process. It can be implemented without relying on any control plane signaling. With the proposed restoration framework, a novel spare capacity allocation problem is defined and is further analyzed on circulant topologies for any single link failure, aiming to gain a solid understanding of the problem. By allowing reuse of monitoring resources for restoration capacity, we are particularly interested in the monitoring resource hidden property, where less or even no monitoring resources are consumed as more working traffic is in place. To deal with general topologies, we introduce a novel heuristic approach to the proposed spare capacity allocation problem, which comprises a generic FDP survivable routing scheme followed by a novel monitoring resource allocation method. Extensive simulation is conducted to examine the proposed scheme and verify the proposed restoration framework.