Fast restoration of signaling packet transportation in WDM networks under multiple failures

Abstract

With the increase of capacity and functionality in WDM networks, the control planes have become more and more important in state monitoring, resource management, and connection maintenance. The capability of fast failure restoration in a control plane not only enables effective network management but also helps efficient recovery of the transport plane. This work presents a signaling network that is able to achieve fast restoration under multiple failures. The mechanism employs distributed path restoration and introduces path probe using failure notification packets, which brings the benefits of low computation as well as short restoration time. Parallel processing architecture is developed and the complexity is analyzed. It is shown that the computation time can be easily controlled below 1 ms for a network with 256 nodes, which means the total restoration time for a wide area network is dominated by the propagation delay. Simulations show that the restored network provides good delay performance for the signaling traffic.