An optimal protection and restoration scheme (OPARS) for optical networks

Protection and restoration are critical network design issues for optical networks since even a single failure for a short duration may result in huge data loss due to the large capacity of optical fibers. However, few studies have been done on these issues for optical burst switching (OBS) networks. Protection and restoration are essential mechanisms for guaranteeing more reliable traffic delivery services. But it is not easy to apply existing mechanisms to optical burst switching (OBS) networks due to its one-way reservation signaling and the statistical burst multiplexing. Thus, to achieve the high transmission performance and reliability simultaneously, unique properties of OBS must be considered in the design of protection scheme. In this paper, an optimal protection and restoration scheme (OPARS) has been introduced that not only optimizes the number of provisioned protection wavelengths adaptively based on the traffic load as well as the quality of service (QoS) requirements of bursts in high speed networks but also minimizes burst loss rates. In addition, the proposed scheme has been used as an efficient contention resolution technique. The simulation results verify that the proposed scheme improve the network resource and channel utilization while guaranteeing the targeted protection reliability and QoS requirements of bursts.