Network Resilience in Future Optical Networks

Network resilience is an issue of deep concern to network operators being eager to deploy high-capacity fibre networks, since a single failure in the network could result in significant losses of revenue. The importance of network reliability will keep pace with the steadily increasing network capacity. For very-high-capacity future optical networks, carrying multitudes of 10 Gbit/s channels per fibre strand, a failure of optical connection will interrupt a vast amount of services running on-line, making the connection availability a factor of great significance. Therefore the ultrahigh capacity future optical networks will face a challenge of providing very efficient and fast survivability mechanisms. In this chapter we review the terminology and basic resilience techniques along with the results of research work on optical network survivability performed in the frame of COST291 cooperation. Our research work was focused on reliability performance improvement and on recovery in multilayer optical networks.