OPN03-4: Efficient Shared-Segment Protection Exploiting the Knowledge of Connection Holding Time

Progress in network technologies and protocols is paving the road towards flexible optical transport networks, in which leasable circuits could be set up and released on a short-term basis. Thus we consider it reasonable that, at least for some types of services, the holding time of connection requests can be known in advance. In this paper, we propose to exploit the knowledge of connection-holding time to improve the performance of an algorithm for shared-segment protection (SSP). For a typical US nationwide network, we compared our approach to an holding-time-unaware, but otherwise shared segmented efficient, approach, obtaining savings on resource overbuild of up to 7% for practical scenarios.