Uninterrupted Network Communication with Efficient Resource Utilization

A challenging issue for network communication is to provide uninterrupted network services even when a link failure occurs. Path protection offers a promising solution by employing a link-disjoint secondary backup path to protect the primary path. Existing path protection mechanisms can be classified into 1+1 protection, 1:1 protection 1:N protection and M:N protection. However, their implementation either consumes too much network resources, or cannot respond to link failure quickly enough without much awareness of users. In this paper, a resourceefficient protection scheme, referred to as α+1 protection, is introduced. In α+1 protection, only critical information of the primary path is duplicated and transferred through the secondary path. The benefit of α+1 protection is twofold. Firstly, it reduces the redundancy of data transmission, and hence improves the efficiency of resource utilization. Secondly, α is a flexible parameter that can be adjusted according to the requirements of different services or networks.