Impact of routing and wavelength selection strategies on GMPLS-controlled distributed restoration

The restorability problem in wavelength-routed networks without wavelength converters is investigated. A distributed control plane based on the generalized multiprotocol label switching (GMPLS) suite is considered for disseminating link-state information and reserving network resources. Different routing and wavelength selection strategies are proposed and a detailed performance analysis is carried out during restoration. Simulation results evaluate the blocking probability due to both lack of available resources (i.e., forward blocking) and resource contentions (i.e., backward blocking). Performance comparison provides some insightful suggestions to be applied to GMPLS-controlled wavelength-routed networks without wavelength converters. First, it is recommended to perform routing and wavelength selection separately at the lightpath source and destination, respectively. Second, routing can be computed on link-state information advertised during provisioning, without the need of flooding link-state information during restoration. In fact, during restoration, the resource contention among concurrent signaling instances is the dominant cause of blocking (i.e., backward blocking overcomes forward blocking). For this reason, intelligent routing and wavelength selection strategies aiming at avoiding or limiting resource contentions can help to improve restorability. In particular, among those strategies, the proposed wavelength selection has a better ability to reduce resource contentions than the routing strategies.