Reducing the OBGP protection switching time in WDM mesh networks

In this paper, a fast protection switching scheme based on the parallel restoration signaling, parallel restoration scheme (PRS), is introduced into the optical border gateway protocol (OBGP) in survivable optical mesh networks. In the PRS, the message for resource reservation along the backup lightpath is forwarded to the upstream autonomous system (AS) ahead of the optical cross connects (OXC) reconfiguration when the working path fails. Compared with the traditional serial restoration scheme (SRS), the PRS can reduce the mean time of protection switching from the working path to the backup path according to theory analyses and simulation experiments. Numerical results demonstrate that the protection time is decreased by more than 50%, if the PRS is applied.