Resilient algorithms for advance bandwidth reservation in media production networks

Abstract

Media production networks connect different actors such as production houses, broadcasters and advertisers over a large geographical area. The substrate network in a media production process can be shared among many users simultaneously. These networks often have predictable traffic, meaning that the timing and bandwidth requirements of data transfers are generally known at least hours or even days in advance. Using this knowledge, an efficient advance reservation mechanism can be deployed to improve the performance in terms of resource utilization and cost. In such mechanisms, to improve the performance, defining strategies to deal with unforeseen failures in the network is required. In this paper, we propose a resilient advance bandwidth reservation algorithm for media production networks. To enable a quick response to sudden changes such as failures in the network, we rely on a protection mechanism, which means that backup paths are found in advance, before any failure happens in the network. The proposed scheme aims at minimizing the resource usage of backups, while it guarantees 100% recovery against any single link failure. We have performed an availability analysis of the proposed scheme considering an optical transport network and compared it with the non-resilient approach. The results show that the proposed scheme performs reasonably well and enhances the availability significantly compared to the non-resilient approach.