Fiber span failure protection in mesh optical networks

A major challenge of optical network design is deciding where spare capacity is needed and how much, so that interrupted traffic may be rerouted in the event of a failure. Given the optical network topology and traffic forecast, the network design needs to map the traffic forecast into optical connection demands. For each optical connection demand, two paths need to be computed, i.e., a service path and a restoration path. In most cases, optical network design mainly considers single failure. If two service paths do not share any single failure, their restoration paths can share the same capacity on any links that they have in common. In this way, the total spare capacity needed for restoration can be dramatically reduced. However, due to the layered architecture in optical networks, a pair of diverse paths in a particular layer won't necessarily be diverse when the lower layer topology is considered. For example, optical networks are typically built on top of a network of fiber spans. A single span cut in the fiber network can cause multiple link failures in the optical layer. In this paper, we investigate fiber span failure protection scenarios in mesh optical networks. Specifically, we provide an algorithm to find two fiber span disjoint paths for each demand, such that the total spare capacity allocated in the network is minimized. Another problem that arises in restoration path computation is the existence of a trap topology. In a trap topology, the pre-selected service path may not have a diverse restoration path even though two diverse paths exist in the network. For simple link-disjoint protection, the min-cost max-flow algorithm can be used to avoid this problem. For fiber span failure protection, the trap topology problem becomes complicated. We show that it is NP-hard problem to find the maximum number of fiber-span disjoint paths between two nodes. We provide two heuristic algorithms to solve this trap topology problem. We have implemented fiber span failure protection in our restoration capacity planning toolkit Cplan. We describe an application of fiber span failure protection at the end of the paper.