Shared Path Protection with Differentiated Reliability in Transmission Impaired WDM Networks

Traditional protection schemes guarantees 100% reliability in case of single link failure which demands resources while differentiated reliability provides a granular protection scheme. Moreover, if the signal quality in a path is below acceptable values, a path cannot be used by incoming requests for lightpath establishment. Therefore, the signal quality needs to be checked by the routing and wavelength assignment algorithm (RWA). This paper investigates shared path protection with differentiated reliability taking into account the PMD and the ASE impairments in path selection. The efficacy of the algorithm proposed is compared to that of its impairment unaware counterpart.