Resource saving: Which resource sharing strategy to protect primary shortest paths?

Abstract

Two strategies of resource sharing are proposed in literature to provide protection while saving resources: (1) restrained sharing which applies the resource sharing to the backup paths only and (2) global sharing which extends the resource sharing to the primary and backup paths. In this paper, we compared the two strategies of resource sharing when the primary paths correspond to the shortest ones according to a strictly positive and static metric. Even when the amount of resources that can be shared between the primary and the backup paths is unbounded, we proved that the maximum number of backup paths is still bounded. Besides, our simulations showed that the resource sharing between the primary and backup paths has very slight impact on the backup path rejection, i.e. the two strategies of resource sharing have very close performances.