Summary
This paper proposes a differential delay aware instantaneous recovery scheme with traffic splitting, in order to tackle multiple link failures, for networks with the coding capability. In the proposed scheme, traffic at the source is split into K equal parts and sent through K working paths. P protection paths carry encoded traffic created from the K split parts at the source. In order to recover from any t failure(s), where 1≤t≤P, the destination node has to buffer the remaining (K + P − t) parts, until the part experiencing the longest delay reaches the destination. The amount of memory buffers depends on the maximum allowable differential delay Δ, the highest difference of delays of any two among the (K + P) disjoint paths, supported at the destination. A large value of Δ increases the amount of required memory buffers, which negatively affects the achievable resource saving because of splitting. We thoroughly investigate how routing with splitting is influenced with respect to Δ, encoding/decoding costs, optical interface rates, buffering costs, the number of protection paths, the number of nodes in the network, and the minimum number of adjacent nodes. The path setup, encoding, synchronization, and merging (decoding) operations are discussed in order to support the proposed scheme. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.