Active-fault-alarm based pre-restoration mechanism in MPLS-TP optical network

The newly developed multi-protocol label switching transport profile (MPLS-TP) fails to actively alarm the fault in advance when conducting restoration in network, or to avoid the false-alarm when equipped with the active-fault-alarm (AFA) to support carrier-grade reliability. In order to solve this problem, a new AFA based pre-restoration mechanism (AFABPRM) is proposed for MPLS-TP controlled optical network, along with the three levels quality-of-service (QoS) based shortest path first rerouting algorithm (TQ-SPF) in this article. The AFABPRM takes full advantage of the AFA technologies, and can solve the false-alarm problem. Analytical and experimental results suggest the better performances of the new mechanism when compared restoration mechanism with or without AFA function, and show that the AFABPRM can solve the false-alarm problem efficiently.