Introducing a Relative Priority for the Shared-Protection Schemes

One the of major challenges of optical network operators is ensuring the stringent levels of availability required by their highest class clients. To achieve this, we introduce relative priorities among the different primary connections contending for access to the shared-protection paths. In this paper, we provide an analytical model for the proposed priority-enabled scheme. As a key distinguishing feature from existing literature, we derive explicit analytic expressions for average the availability and service disruption rate for the different priority classes.