Fast-Unreserved Failure Restoration for Meshed Intelligent Photonic Networks

Abstract

In this article, an unreserved restoration solution for fast failure restoration in intelligent photonic networks is proposed. The unreserved restoration scheme is a real-time restoration technique that allows for utilizing network capacity dynamically and with full flexibility. However, it has the disadvantage of having a long restoration time as real-time redials are required after a failure is detected. The restoration time is crucial because long restoration times can result in data loss that is not expected, especially in high-speed networks. The proposed method targets reducing the aggregated optical cross-connect switching time to minimize real-time failure restoration time. With the proposed solution, in an event of failure, the restoration time can be reduced to times that are similar to those achieved in the reserved schemes. Common unreserved schemes have an inherent need for retries because the first try after failure detection and notification cannot always be guaranteed due to lack of network resource. In this paper, an enhanced implementation for the proposed solution is designed and described, which allows the features of the proposed solution to be fully realized and overcomes the inherent drawback of redundant OXC switching events for retries in common unreserved schemes. Through simulation experiments, it is shown that under a given network condition, the real-time path setup time for failure restoration required in the proposed solution can be improved by ∼68% compared with the common unreserved schemes.