Capacity Efficiency of Distributed Path Restoration Mechanisms in Optical Mesh Networks

Abstract

In this study the restoration performance of two closely related Sender/Chooser-based distributed path restoration protocols (both extensions of the Self-Healing Network (SHN) to path restoration) is compared. Some pathological situations in which these Sender/Chooser-based restoration algorithms perform suboptimally are identified and, where available, possible solutions are proposed. Built-in mechanisms to resolve contention between Sender/Chooser pairs were found to be very helpful. In addition, the performance of the distributed restoration algorithms studied was found to be close to its theoretical upper bound, suggesting that the pathological situations described may not be that important for real-life networks.