Performance Evaluation of Optical Multicast Protection Approaches for Combined Node and Link Failure Recovery

Up to now, most research on optical multicast protection has been focused on link failure recovery, due to its predominance. Nevertheless, the impact of node failures is more severe, although they are less frequent. In a network, it might be less cost effective to implement dedicated protection approaches for separate link failure recovery and node failure recovery. A combined node and link failure recovery approach is more cost-effective and very crucial to network survivability. Hence, in this paper, we provide a detailed performance evaluation of several types of optical multicast protection approaches for 100% combined node and link failure recovery. The optical multicast protection approaches considered in this paper include the node-and-link protecting p-cycle based approach, the tree-protecting p -cycle based approach and the optimal path pair based approach. Among them, the node-and-link protecting p-cycle based approach is newly proposed in this paper, which is a novel multicast application of previously reported ordinary p-cycle approach. Simulation results show that the integer linear programming based spare capacity optimization of node-and-link protecting p-cycle algorithm achieves the best capacity efficiency, for static traffic. For dynamic traffic, the efficiency-score based heuristic algorithm of node-and-link protecting p-cycle outperforms the other heuristic algorithms.