Priority-aware optical shared protection: An offline evaluation study

The availability of an optical connection is considered to be a critical service differentiator in WDM optical networks. In this regard, the design of a protection scheme that improves the availability of high priority optical connections and makes efficient use of optical resources is a major challenge faced by optical network operators. In a previous study, we proposed the so-called priority-aware shared protection survivability scheme as a potential solution to this design issue. In this paper, we complement our previous study. More specifically, we develop an offline study whose main purpose is to assess the efficiency of the priority-aware shared protection scheme. Through this study, we show that the priority-aware shared protection strategy as opposed to existing protection strategies is able to achieve the best tradeoff between optical resource usage and optical connections’ availability satisfaction. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.