Design of Shared Mesh Restoration Schemes with Traffic Load Balancing Constraint

This paper presents two novel shared mesh restoration schemes for survivable transport networks. First, we present a two-step load balancing pool sharing (LBPS) scheme and show how this scheme can be used to balance the loads on the network links while still minimizing the reserved working and backup capacity in the network. Then, we propose an iterative load balancing pool sharing (ILBPS) algorithm, designed to eliminate the trap-topology problem associated with all two-step mesh restoration algorithms (including LBPS) while still achieving the LBPS algorithm´s goals. We compare the capacity-usage, load balancing, and computation complexity performances of these algorithms with two representative algorithms. We show that with the proposed schemes, the network traffic can similarly, or more evenly, be distributed among network links than with the other schemes, at lower computation cost.