Reliability and recovery time differentiated routing in WDM optical networks

We study the dynamic survivable lightpath provisioning problem in wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) optical mesh networks. Dynamic provisioning implies routing of connection requests that arrive one at a time with no a priori knowledge of future arrivals. We propose a new protection approach to provision lightpath requests according to their differentiated joint quality-of-service (QoS) requirements: connection reliability and recovery time, in a resource efficient manner. In our scheme, a probabilistic failure environment is assumed. We provide differentiated protection to the requests according to their differentiated reliability requirements, and at the same time guarantee the specified connection recovery time if failures occur and the connection is recoverable from these failures. We compare the proposed scheme with several sample full or partial protection schemes. Simulation results show that both QoS parameters have serious impact on the network performance and the proposed joint-QoS protection scheme significantly outperforms the other sample full or partial protection schemes in terms of connection blocking probability