Path Protecting p-Cycles and the Protected Working Capacity Envelope Concept: Addressing the needs of dynamic transparent optical networks

摘要

Two important aspects of optical networking are to ensure transmission integrity when connecting optically transparent channels in real time for protection, and the handling of dynamic demand, especially when survivability considerations are added. The prevalent approach for providing protected dynamic lightpath services is signaling intensive, database dependent, and requires on-the-fly cross-connection of standby lightwave channels to form protection paths. With two inter-related new concepts, we address concerns about on-the-fly concatenation of transparent optical channels to form protection paths and improve the scalability, and reduce database dependence and signalling intensity associated with current methods. An extension of the p-cycles concept to end-to-end path protection, in conjunction with the concept of a protected working capacity envelope for dynamic provisioning (which has no per-connection signaling for backup path establishment) yields a highly efficient network architecture in which protection paths are fully pre-cross-connected prior to failure and only the two lightpath end-nodes need to detect path failure and switch the lightpath (or its traffic) into a corresponding pre-planned path-protecting p-cycle.