A New p-Cycle Selection Approach Based on Efficient Restoration Measure for WDM Optical Networks

The study of protection against failures in WDM optical networks plays strategic importance due to huge bandwidth of optical fiber. The p-Cycle is a novel protection approach based on pre-configured cycles to provide a fast recovery for single link failure. The optimal selection of cycles is the central problem to get a high protection performance of p-Cycle approach. In that sense, the importance of the length of a cycle for fast restoration is studied in this paper, because it affects directly the quality of restoration, therefore, the quality-of-service can be affected. This paper proposes a new heuristic approach and a new evaluation metric to solve the p-Cycle protection problem which simultaneously optimizes cost, protection, length and fairness of solutions in a mono-objective approach. Experimental results show a good performance of the heuristic proposed, when is compared with a recent Genetic Algorithms approach and the state-of-the-art ILP method.