Network performance improvement through differentiated survivability services in WDM networks

Core networks based on WDM technology constitute a promising and viable solution to support emerging applications requiring high availability, reliability, and quality of service guarantees. Due to the enormous bandwidth offered by these networks and the increasing number of “mission critical” applications, survivability is becoming an essential network design aspect. We focus on providing resilience in WDM optical networks supporting differentiated survivability traffic requirements. Our work is based on the backup multiplexing technique in order to facilitate efficient resource sharing and investigate different routing and wavelength assignment schemes that considerably enhance the spare capacity utilization. A simple approach that can be used to assign different classes of service supporting varying restoration requirements is proposed, and significant network performance improvement is demonstrated through relevant simulations.