Hierarchical fairness based re-provisioning in post-disaster telecom networks

Wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) optical networks as the most promising telecom backbone are facing critical threaten from large-scale disasters, such as earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, and human attack. Disasters may cause severe damage to network components (links/nodes) and drastic traffic fluctuations in post-disaster phases, leading to resource crunch. In this paper, we study optimal traffic re-provisioning under resource crunch and propose a hierarchical fairness based re-provisioning (HFR) scheme to maintain service connectivity and balance traffic flow in post-disaster optical networks. By exploiting a multistage re-provisioning process and a cyclic re-provisioning process, HFR can effectively maintain service connectivity and achieve a hierarchical fairness on traffic distribution. Numerical results show that, the proposed HFR, compared with some counterparts, can obtain satisfactory performance in terms of connection loss ratio, traffic loss ratio, and fairness of traffic distribution.