An adaptive–alternative restoration algorithm for optical networks

Optical networks have been considered as the most capable technology for supplying the ever-increasing network bandwidth demand generated by the new Internet services. However, a significant challenge for optical networks is to provide an efficient manner to recover the lost communications due to failures. A failure in a system component or an optical fiber link can shut down all the crossing lightpaths, which may lead to a decrease in the revenue for clients or some sanctions to the providers due to an unattended agreed service level. In this work, we propose an adaptive–alternative path restoration algorithm, named NrPSR-R. The proposal has an adaptation capability according to the network state. NrPSR-R finds the Nr routes with minimum cost and selects one of them using a pre-defined policy. We performed a parametric analysis of the NrPSR-R algorithm. We also compared our proposal to other well-known restoration algorithms on different scenarios and NrPSR-R outperformed the others.

Journal article