Cost-Efficient Transmitter/Receiver Deployment for Proactive Fault Diagnosis in All-Optical Networks

A scalable fault management system, including fault detection and localization capability, is crucial for future all-optical networks. In our previous work [5-7], we have proposed adaptive fault diagnosis schemes that deploy proactive lightpath probes to identify network failures, and have developed an asymptotically optimal run-length probing scheme to minimize the diagnostic effort (i.e., the number of lightpath probes). In this research, we aim to investigate the diagnostic hardware cost, i.e., the cost resulted from transmitter/receiver (Tx/Rx) pairs for probe transmission and detection. As a benchmark, we first show that, in order to identify all possible network failures, all the network nodes have to be equipped with diagnostic Tx/Rx pairs. We then develop a probabilistic analysis framework to characterize the trade-off between hardware cost (i.e., the number of nodes equipped with Tx/Rx pairs) and diagnosis capability (i.e., the probability of successful failure detection and localization). Our results suggest that, for practical situations, the hardware cost can be reduced significantly by accepting a small amount of uncertainty about the failure status.