RINGOSTAR: an evolutionary performance-enhancing WDM upgrade of IEEE 802.17 resilient packet ring

To upgrade IEEE 802.17 Resilient Packet Ring networks by WDM, most previously reported approaches deploy WDM on the ring, requiring modifications of all nodes at the architecture and/or protocol level without significantly enhancing the performance of RPR apart from increased capacity and optical bypassing capability. In this article we aim at rethinking the box. Leveraging on the dark fiber infrastructure abundantly available in today´s metropolitan areas, a subset of RPR nodes are interconnected by a single-hop star WDM subnetwork in a pay-as-you-grow manner. Building on RPR´s destination stripping, wrapping, and steering techniques, we describe and examine two novel evolutionary performance-enhancing techniques: proxy stripping and protectoration. Our findings show that the resultant RINGOSTAR network not only dramatically increases spatial reuse, provides fairness as well as fast and efficient resilience against multiple failures but also supports both metro core´s uniform and in particular metro edge´s strongly hubbed traffic in a highly efficient way