Optimal cost and performance evaluation of various protection schemes for a reliable all-optical subwavelength switching network

Abstract—In this paper, we study several alternatives of protection for a time-domain wavelength interleaved network (TWIN), an optical burst switching technology for transport networks with active edge nodes, passive core nodes, and time-slotted operation. The main difference between those alternatives concerns the degree of resource sharing (transmitters, receivers, and wavelengths). After an extended study on the protection challenges in TWIN, we distinguish three main protection schemes: totally shared protection, partially shared protection, and dedicated protection. We propose a network dimensioning comparison for the aforementioned schemes, based on linear programming formulation addressing the optimization of a used resource. In addition, we assess the ability of the proposed schemes to maintain network performance during the failure in terms of delay, jitter, and packet loss ratio. The obtained results show that the totally shared protection scheme outperforms the other schemes in terms of resource utilization with nonsignificant degradation of the performance and a prompt recovery time.