Minimizing protection cost for high-speed recovery of mission critical traffic in WDM mesh networks

Network survivability depends on the choice of recovery scheme and offers challenging tradeoffs in terms of recovery speed, cost, and management complexity. To allow more efficient operation of backbone networks, service differentiation based on reliability requirements have been proposed. However, the cost for protecting mission critical data using high-speed recovery schemes can still be expensive. We previously described an online protection scheme called Streams Protection that allows fast recovery and low data loss with little extra capacity. In this paper, we present a capacity optimization technique using the Streams Protection scheme for use with static traffic demands consisting of high-priority traffic. Unlike the use of flexible, dynamic provisioning, which is desirable for non-critical traffic (may be blocked depending on resource availability), high-priority, mission critical traffic must be guaranteed a high level of reliability and stability, which lends itself better to more static provisioning models. Our results show that using the proposed technique, we can achieve significant savings in protection capacity while providing the recovery speed and low data loss figures of a fully dedicated protection scheme.