1+N Protection Against Multiple Link Failures in Mesh Networks

In [1], the author presented a 1+N protection strategy against single link failures using a network coding approach on p-Cycles. In this paper, we extend this approach to protect against multiple link failures. For the network to be protected against M link failures, M p-Cycles are used. The connections sharing a certain cycle must have link disjoint paths, and they encode their transmitted and received data units on two counter rotating half cycles on each of the two cycles. To recover from m link failures using M cycles, where 1 les m les M, the data units are encoded on the cycles in such a way that each node affected by failures should recover m linearly independent combinations of the m units affected by the failures. To illustrate the concept, we show how to protect against two link failures, and describe in detail the encoding and decoding processes.