Supporting differentiated resilience classes in multilayer networks

The concept of providing differentiated classes of resilient services over communications networks has received a lot of attention in the literature. A number of proposals tried to address the problem by provisioning different classes of services with different protection schemes. However, most of these works are applied to a single layer and lack cross layer coordination in multilayer scenarios. In addition, there is an increasing need for supporting services with very high resilience requirements over future communications networks. This, however, has to be done in a cost efficient manner and without over-engineering the network. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that simplifies the whole design and achieves both high resilience and differentiation. Our approach, utilizes the spine concept idea of embedding a subnetwork at the physical layer with comparatively high availability link and node values [1]. This lays a foundation for differentiation between multiple classes of flows. Then, cross layer mapping and spine-aware routing are performed in a way that transfers this differentiation capability to the upper layer network and flows. We provide two joint routing-mapping optimization formulations and evaluate their performance in a multilayer scenario.