Distributed restoration strategies in telecommunications networks

Failures in future high-bandwidth transport networks could result in very high traffic and revenue losses. A failure restoration strategy is therefore required which is fast, minimal-cost and low-risk. In this paper we advocate the systematic application of distributed restoration methods to meet this future need. We have developed a software simulation tool to investigate distributed restoration algorithms and present results that suggest distributed span restoration in SDH networks is feasible in about one second. We have also extended a heuristic algorithm to optimise the true cost of protection capacity in meshed networks, and adapted it to produce networks resilient to node failure, assuming prioritised restoration problems