Opt. Switch. Netw. | 2019
An offline cost-efficient strategy for multicast traffic protection in WDM optical mesh networks to aid rapid recovery
Abstract
Abstract The most effective way of providing popular user services such as high-definition television, video conferencing and distributed gaming over the Internet is multicasting. Protecting multicast sessions against single link failure or a fiber cut in the WDM optical backbone is thus vital. Protection schemes involve reserving resources for backup paths that remain idle during normal fault-free operation. It is thus important to design protection or survivability schemes that consume as few extra resources as possible. A number of protection schemes for multicast sessions exist in the literature but only few can provide rapid recovery. In this paper we propose a new offline strategy for ensuring survivability of multicast traffic that can aid rapid recovery from a link failure. Our strategy is designed to achieve significant resource saving while providing recovery speed comparable to 1:1 dedicated path protection. We first propose an Integer Linear Program formulation to solve the problem optimally for small networks and then a heuristic for large networks. Performance comparisons show that our heuristic performs better than two well-known heuristics and also produces near optimal results. Time complexity analysis further shows that our heuristic runs in polynomial time.