Dynamic p-cycles selection in optical WDM mesh networks

P-cycles have been recognized as a useful protection scheme in WDM mesh networks. This is a type of shared link protection that not only retains the mesh-like capacity efficiency, but also achieves the ring-like protection switching speed. However, finding the optimal set of p-cycles for protecting traffic demands is not a simple task and is an NP-hard problem. A general approach is to determine a set of candidate p-cycles and then determine optimal or near-optimal solutions by using integer linear programming (ILP) models or heuristics. In a dense mesh network, however, the number of candidate cycles is huge, and increases exponentially if the node number is increased. Thus, searching for a suitable set of efficient candidate cycles is crucial and imperative to balancing the computational time and the optimality of solutions. In this paper, we propose a dynamic P-cycles selection (DPS) algorithm that improves the efficiency of enumerating candidate p-cycles. The dynamic approach for cycle selection is based on the network state. In the DPS algorithm, all cycles are found and stored, then an efficient and sufficient set of p-cycles is extracted to achieve 100% working protection, minimize the spare capacity, and reduce time complexity.