Dimensioning resilient optical grids

An important problem in optical networking is to dimension the network: given the amount of traffic to carry, determine the required amount of network resources (wavelengths). In traditional scenarios, the traffic is specified in terms of a source-destination based traffic matrix. In an optical Grid scenario however, the anycast principle applies: users submit jobs, and generally do not care where exactly they end up being executed. This complicates dimensioning, since the destination of traffic is not known beforehand (in contrast to the assumptions in traditional dimensioning algorithms). On the other hand, this flexibility in choosing a destination opens opportunities to save on backup network resources: to protect against failures, we can opt to redirect jobs to another location (i.e. exploit relocation). In this paper we (i) outline how to derive a traffic matrix in a stepwise grid dimensioning approach, and (ii) present an assessment of potential network resource savings in resilient network dimensioning by exploiting relocation.