Cluster-based protection for survivable fiber-wireless access networks

Survivability is one of the key issues in fiber-wireless (FiWi) access networks, since network component failure may cause huge data loss. Especially in the scenario of segment failure, all optical network units (ONUs) lose their connections with the optical line terminal. Previous works focus on the protection of FiWi against segment failure by deploying backup fibers among the backup ONUs in different segments. However, these works consider only single segment failure. They also ignore the issue of traffic recovery efficiency. More importantly, they underutilize the backup fibers and ignore optimizing the selection of backup ONUs. Therefore, these works usually require a considerable deployment cost for backup fibers. To conquer these challenges, we propose an efficient protection scheme called cluster-based protection (CBP) in this paper. In CBP, we first partition the segments in the network into clusters in order to reduce the overhead for the management of traffic recovery. Then, we select one of the ONUs in each segment as the backup ONU and deploy backup fibers among the backup ONUs of different segments in the same cluster. Under a constraint on the maximum number of segments in each cluster, the CBP scheme aims to protect FiWi against the simultaneous failures of multiple segments with a minimum deployment cost for backup fibers. We propose both an integer-linear-programming-based approach and a heuristic approach to solve the joint optimization problem in CBP of selecting backup ONUs, clustering segments, and deploying backup fibers. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work regarding the survivability of FiWi against the simultaneous failures of multiple segments. Through extensive simulation, we demonstrate that our CBP scheme outperforms the previous works significantly in terms of survivability enhancement and cost savings.