Bruce Gilbert Cortez

The emerging intelligent optical network: now a reality

The nationwide AT&T Intelligent Optical Network is being deployed with the new intelligent network elements to create a network with reduced capital cost, simplified operations, improved performance and reliability, with the ability to quickly support new services. The mesh architecture and the new control plane are keys to making this network a reality.

Improving restoration success in mesh optical networks [Invited]

In shared mesh restoration, a distributed signaling protocol is used to reroute connections from failed service paths to restoration paths upon failure events. However, even when the network contains sufficient capacity, the restoration paths could be blocked for two different reasons: (1) with distributed restoration-path selection schemes, multiple restoration paths may compete for the capacity of the same logical links, even when other logical links have sufficient capacity; (2) multiple restoration-path setup attempts may compete for the same channels within the logical link (the glare problem), even when sufficient capacity is available within the logical link. We propose a hybrid distributed-centralized restoration mechanism for restoration-path selection and a channel-selection scheme that eliminates almost all glares. As shown from simulation in a typical intercity backbone network, our proposed hybrid mechanism improves the first restoration attempt success ratio by 40% compared with a pure distributed restoration approach. In addition, the proposed restoration-path selection algorithm saves up to 50% of restoration capacity compared with the disjoint shortest-path algorithm and 15% compared with a previously published greedy algorithm.