Abstract
Recently there has been interest in so-called pre-cross-connected protection
architectures for optical networks. The main benefit of pre-cross-connected
protection is that multiple cross-connection actions are not required in real time
at the time of failure. This addresses the practical concern that, in a transparent
optical network, one may not be able to make a series of protection path-forming
cross-connections in a succession of optical spans with certainty that the resultant
end-to-end connection has optical path integrity. Self-healing rings, p-cycles, and
preconnected linear segment protection are examples of prior methods that employ
prefailure cross-connection of protection capacity but are not end-to-end
path-oriented. More recent work has proposed pre-cross-connected trails (PXTs),
which are fully preconnected linear path-protecting structures. The same work also
provided an online heuristic algorithm for generating PXT network designs. However,
important and interesting properties such as length and cyclicity of the PXT
structures remained to be characterized. We delve further into PXT network design,
attempting to validate claims made previously and to understand the structural and
operational properties of PXTs. This involves reimplementation of and
experimentation with the above heuristic. Results show that heuristically obtained
designs frequently contain PXTs of great total length and high complexity, as well
as other PXTs that are equivalent to 1+1 automatic protection switching (APS)
arrangements. Through diagramming and statistical analysis of PXT characteristics we
give the first intuitive appreciation of the structure and function of
PXTs.
© 2006 Optical Society of America
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