The Hop-Count Effect on the Optimal Spare Capacity for P-Cycles, Rings and All-Routes

In this paper, we present a comparison study among rings, p-cycles and all-paths to show the effect of the hop-count limit on the optimal spare capacity performance of the protection path. With such restriction on the protection path length, we formulate a ratio to observe how different optimal cost and spare capacity product of one scheme would perform with respect to each other. We also use the stability point (after which there is no significant improvement on this ratio) as a comparison measure. For small-sized network (15-20 nodes), the stability point in both rings and all-paths was found to be around 2 to 3 hops less than the p-cycles, and it occurs at hop-length equals half of the max possible path length. For larger networks with an average nodal degree of at least 3, this point appears to occur at hop-length equals 30-35% of the max possible path length