Bulk provisioning of LSP requests with shared path protection in a PCE-based WDM network

The Path Computation Element (PCE) is a network entity utilized for network path computation operations, especially useful in optical networks based on wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). In the PCE paradigm, the communication between a node and the PCE is specified by the Path Computation Element Communication Protocol (PCEP). According to PCEP protocol, multiple LSP (Label Switched Path) requests can be bundled together before being sent to the PCE in order to reduce the control overhead. Multiple bundles received by the PCE can then be provisioned at once as a single bulk. Enabling bulk provisioning of LSP requests at the PCE in a concurrent manner can bring significant improvements in terms of higher network resource utilization and control plane overhead reduction. However, these advantages come at a cost of a longer connection setup-time and of an instantaneous increase in the network load, which may lead to a degradation of the network performance, e.g. blocking probability. In this study pros and cons of bulk provisioning are explored in shared path protection (SPP) by comparing sequential and concurrent path computation strategies. An efficient meta-heuristic named GRASP_SPP_BP (Greedy Random Adoptive Search Procedure for Shared Path Protection with Bulk Provisioning) is proposed for concurrent provisioning of primary and shared backup path pairs. GRASP_SPP_BP minimizes the backup resource consumption while requiring minimal path computation time. The presented results demonstrate that, in a SPP network scenario, a significant reduction in the PCEP control overhead, network blocking probability and backup resource consumption can be achieved via LSP bulk provisioning at the PCE with the proposed GRASP_SPP_BP approach.