Differentiated resilience with dynamic traffic grooming for WDM mesh networks

The differentiation of resilience services to meet the requirements of different traffic types is a major architectural and design issue. This paper investigates the problem of differentiated resilience for wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) networks with dynamic traffic grooming. Traffic grooming supports efficient utilization of network resources by allowing sub-wavelength granularity connections to be groomed onto a single lightpath. We propose two differentiated resilience schemes at different grooming levels - Differentiated Resilience at Lightpath (DRAL) level scheme and Differentiated Resilience at Connection (DRAC) level scheme. These schemes explore different ways of provisioning backup paths and tradeoff between bandwidth efficiency and the number of required grooming ports. Both schemes support three resilience classes: dedicated protection, shared protection and restoration. Simulation is carried out to evaluate and compare the two differentiated resilience schemes. Simulation results show that DRAL is not very sensitive to the changes in the number of grooming ports while DRAC utilizes grooming ports more aggressively as it trades grooming ports for bandwidth efficiency in routing and grooming.