Network Coding for Protection against Multiple Link Failures in Multi-Domain Networks

Many networks today are composed of numerous subnetworks or domains. The connection points of these domains are important and vulnerable parts of the communication. Therefore, one of the key points of protection schemes today is being able to protect these interconnections. Hence, in this type of networks a protection mechanism is applied, where there is 1+1 protection inside each domain and dual homing at the borders. With this mechanism, the breakdown due to the failure of the interconnection elements is prohibited. This system enables the network to survive any node or link failure in each domain. However, it suffers from the high capacity need on the border links, where data has to be transmitted bidirectionally for each single demand. We are showing that combining network coding with this protection mechanism gives a realization, which outperforms the existing mechanism by providing high resource savings. We present the theoretical basis and the application methodology of the proposed method.