Comparison of capacity requirements for the self-protecting multipath and similar mechanisms in resilient packet networks

We compare the capacity requirements of two new end-to-end (e2e) protection switching mechanisms: the self-protecting multipath (SPM) and several (multi-)path protection (PP) methods. Their structure consists of disjoint parallel e2e paths and the traffic is distributed over these paths according to a load balancing function. If one of the paths fails, the traffic is redistributed to the working paths according to a path failure specific load balancing function. The contribution of this work is the calculation of the path layout and the load balancing functions for both the PP and the SPM method. We use exact optimizations and simple heuristics for that objective and take a dimensioning approach to compare the capacity requirements of the different mechanisms. Our results illustrate, e.g., that the savings potential depends on the network topology and that 17% additional capacity can be sufficient for full resilience against all single router and link failures in well designed networks