Band-segment protection in multi-granular optical networks

Protections are traditionally realized at fiber level (e.g., link protection) or wavelength level (e.g., path protection) in wavelength routing networks. With the advancing of waveband switching (WBS) techniques, these schemes may fail to efficiently accommodate the major goal of minimizing the node size (i.e., port count) in WBS networks. To achieve both the survivability and port reduction, we introduce the band-segment (BS) concept in WBS networks by which we can operate the protection at waveband level thus saving ports. Accordingly, we propose shared and dedicated protection schemes using band-segments, namely shared band-segment protection (SBSP) and dedicated band-segment protection (DBSP) for WBS networks. Our simulation shows DBSP outperforms dedicated path protection dramatically in terms of port count, while SBSP can achieve both resource sharing and port reduction.