Performance Comparison of Protection Strategies in WDM Mesh Networks

Recent development in optical networking employing wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) fulfills the high bandwidth demand applications. Failure of such networks, leads to enormous data and revenue loss. Protection is one of the key techniques, which is used in designing survivable WDM networks. In this paper we compare dedicated and shared protection strategies employed in WDMmesh networks to protect optical networks failure, particularly fiber failure. Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm is considered for carrying out simulations. The paper compares the performance of protection schemes, such as, dedicated path protection (DPP), shared path protection (SPP) and shared link protection (SLP) schemes. Capacity utilization, switching time and blocking probability are the parameters considered to measure the performance of the protection schemes. Simulation results show that, SPP is more efficient in terms of capacity utilization over DPP and SLP schemes, whereas, SLP offered better switching time than both DPP and SPP schemes. The average call drop rate is minimum for shared path protection scheme and maximum for shared link protection scheme. Keywords—blocking probability, protection, survivability, switching time, WDM networks.