Dynamic survivable routing for shared segment protection

This paper provides a thorough study on shared segment protection (SSP) for mesh communication networks in the complete routing information scenario, where the integer linear program (ILP) in [1] is extended such that the following two constraints are well addressed: (a) The restoration time constraint for each connection request, and (b) the switching/merging capacity constraint at each node. A novel approach, called SSP algorithm, is developed to reduce the extremely high computation complexity in solving the ILP formulation. Basically, our approach is to derive a good approximation on the parameters in the ILP by referring to the result of solving the corresponding shared path protection (SPP) problem. Thus, the design space can be significantly reduced by eliminating some edges in the graphs. We will show in the simulation that with our approach, the optimality can be achieved in most of the cases. To verify the proposed formulation and investigate the performance impairment in terms of average cost and success rate by the additional two constraints, extensive simulation work has been conducted on three network topologies, in which SPP and shared link protection (SLP) are implemented for comparison. We will demonstrate that the proposed SSP algorithm can effectively and efficiently solve the survivable routing problem with constraints on restoration time and switching/merging capability of each node. The comparison among the three protection types further verifies that SSP can yield significant advantages over SPP and SLP without taking much computation time.