Heuristic Solution to Protect Communications in WDM Networks using P-cycles

Overview & Synopsis

Optical WDM mesh networks are able to transport huge amount of information. The use of such technology however poses the problem of protection against failures such as fibre cuts. One of the principal methods for link protection used in optical WDM networks is pre-configured protection cycle (p-cycle). The major problem of this method of protection resides in finding the optimal set of p-cycles which protect the network for a given distribution of working capacity. Existing heuristics generate a large set of p-cycle candidates which are entirely independent of the network state, and from then the good sub-set of p-cycles which will protect the network is selected. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm of generation of p-cycles based on the incremental aggregation of the shortest cycles. Our generation of p-cycles depends on the state of the network. This enables us to choose an efficient set of p-cycles which will protect the network. The set of p-cycles that we generate is the final set which will protect the network, in other words our heuristic does not go through the additional step of p-cycle selection