Differential Capacity p-Cycles

Abstract

Survivability has become a central part of modern optical network design as the hundreds of wavelengths get multiplexed on fibers carrying data at Tbps speeds in DWDM networks. Provisioning for 100% restoration on failure using minimum amount of resources has become an important design problem. p-Cycles have emerged as a useful fault tolerance mechanism that operate at the speed of SONET rings, but also have low mesh-like spare capacity requirement.

In this thesis, a modified version of p-cycle, called differential capacity p-cycle, is proposed that improve spare capacity efficiency beyond what is provided by a set of traditional p-cycles. Different variants of differential capacity p-cycles are proposed, analogous to some of the traditional p-cycle variants. The designs of the various types of differential capacity p-cycles are formulated using integer linear programs, and the spare capacity usage of these new structures are compared with that of traditional p-cycles and their variants.