On the merit of IP/MPLS protection/restoration in IP over WDM networks

The purpose of this work is to show the benefits gained by dynamically provisioning low-rate traffic streams at the IP/MPLS layer in future IP-centric WDM-based optical networks. First, several low-rate data flows are statistically multiplexed (groomed) onto one wavelength at the IP/MPLS router. Then, conventional dynamic lightpath provisioning schemes at the physical WDM layer, where the bandwidth of a connection request is assumed to be a full wavelength capacity, are extended to allow the provisioning of "sub-lambda" connection flow requests at the IP/MPLS layer. In this work, provisioning a connection request implies that a flow of data is successfully routed if both an active path and another alternate link and node-disjoint backup path are setup at the same time