p-Cycle-based protection of multicast connections in metropolitan area optical networks with quality-of-transmission considerations

This paper investigates the problem of protecting multicast sessions in transparent optical networks. It utilizes a novel cycle based heuristic algorithm called Q-based p-Cycles Heuristic (QBPCH), that is used for the decomposition of the graph network into a set of p-cycles, while taking into account the physical layer impairments (PLIs) via a Q-budgeting approach. In this technique the length of these cycles is constrained in order to limit the effect of the impairments for the protection paths. The proposed scheme exhibits improved performance in terms of blocking probability when compared to a traditional ring cover heuristic (RC) and to a Hamiltonian cycle (HC) approach.