Abstract

In order to maintain a high level of service availability, carriers and/or service providers usually set aside extra capacity to backup their working components at considerable extra cost. This paper examines trade-offs between cost (protection capacity), speed of recovery (average restoration time) and restorability (fraction of light-paths that are restored) in WDM mesh networks, by considering various restoration schemes found in the literature as well as in practice. The simulation results we obtain can be used to provide meaningful guidelines in making decisions between several options.

© 2002 Optical Society of America