This thesis focuses on the survivable routing problem in WDM mesh networks where the objective is to minimize the total number of wavelengths used for establishing working and protection paths in the WDM networks. The past studies for survivable routing suffers from the scalability problem when the number of nodes/links or connection requests grow in the network. In this thesis, a novel path based shared protection framework namely Inter-Group Shared protection (I-GSP) is proposed where the traffic matrix can be divided into multiple protection groups (PGs) based on specific grouping policy. Optimization is performed on these PGs such that sharing of protection wavelengths is considered not only inside a PG, but between the PGs. Simulation results show that I-GSP based integer linear programming model, namely, ILP-II solves the networks in a reasonable amount of time for which a regular integer linear programming formulation, namely, ILP-I becomes computationally intractable. For most of the cases the gap between the optimal solution and the ILP-II ranges between (2-16)%. The proposed ILP-II model yields a scalable solution for the capacity planning in the survivable optical networks based on the proposed I-GSP protection architecture.

This thesis focuses on the survivable routing problem in WDM mesh networks where the objective is to minimize the total number of wavelengths used for establishing working and protection paths in the WDM networks. The past studies for survivable routing suffers from the scalability problem when the number of nodes/links or connection requests grow in the network. In this thesis, a novel path based shared protection framework namely Inter-Group Shared protection (I-GSP) is proposed where the traffic matrix can be divided into multiple protection groups (PGs) based on specific grouping policy. Optimization is performed on these PGs such that sharing of protection wavelengths is considered not only inside a PG, but between the PGs. Simulation results show that I-GSP based integer linear programming model, namely, ILP-II solves the networks in a reasonable amount of time for which a regular integer linear programming formulation, namely, ILP-I becomes computationally intractable. For most of the cases the gap between the optimal solution and the ILP-II ranges between (2-16)%. The proposed ILP-II model yields a scalable solution for the capacity planning in the survivable optical networks based on the proposed I-GSP protection architecture.

Finding an optimal solution to the problem of fast and efficient provisioning of reliable connections and failure recovery in future intelligent optical networks is an ongoing challenge. In this dissertation, we investigate and compare the performance of an adapted shared-path protection algorithm with a more conventional approach; both designed for survivable optical Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) mesh networks. The effect of different classes of service on performance is also investigated. Dedicated path protection is a proactive scheme which reserves spare resources to combat single link failures. Conventional Shared-path Protection (CSP) is desirable due to the efficient utilization of resources which results from the sharing of backup paths. Availability is an important performance assessment factor which measures the probability that a connection is in an operational state at some point in time. It is the instantaneous counterpart of reliability. Therefore, connections that do not meet their availability requirements are considered to be unreliable. Reliability Aware Shared-path Protection (RASP) adopts the advantages of CSP by provisioning reliable connections efficiently, but provides protection for unreliable connections only. With the use of a link disjoint parameter, RASP also permits the routing of partial link disjoint backup paths. A simulation study, which evaluates four performance parameters, is undertaken using a South African mesh network. The parameters that are investigated are: 1. Blocking Probability (BP), which considers the percentage of connection requests that are blocked, 2. Backup Success Ratio (BSR), which considers the number of connections that are successfully provisioned with a backup protection path, 3. Backup Primary Resource Ratio (BPR), which considers the ratio of resources utilized to cater for working traffic to the resources reserved for protection paths and lastly 4. Reliability Satisfaction Ratio (RSR), which evaluates the ratio of provisioned connections that meet their availability requirements to the total number of provisioned connections. Under dynamic traffic conditions with varying network load, simulation results show that RASP can provision reliable connections and satisfy Service Level Agreement (SLA) requirements. A competitive Blocking Probability (BP) and lower Backup Primary Resource Ratio (BPR) signify an improvement in resource utilization efficiency. A higher Backup Success Ratio (BSR) was also achieved under high Quality of Service (QoS) constraints. The significance of different availability requirements is evaluated by creating three categories, high availability, medium availability and low availability. These three categories represent three classes of service, with availability used as the QoS parameter. Within each class, the performance of RASP and CSP is observed and analyzed, using the parameters described above. Results show that both the BP and BPR increase with an increase in the availability requirements. The RSR decreases as the reliability requirements increase and a variation in BSR is also indicated. / Dissertation (MEng)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering / unrestricted

The continuous growth of traffic demand driven by the brisk increase in number of Internet users and emerging online services creates new challenges for communication networks. The latest advances in Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) technology make it possible to build Transparent Optical Networks (TONs) which are expected to be able to satisfy this rapidly growing capacity demand. Moreover, with the ability of TONs to transparently carry the optical signal from source to destination, electronic processing of the tremendous amount of data can be avoided and optical-to-electrical-to-optical (O/E/O) conversion at intermediate nodes can be eliminated. Consequently, transparent WDM networks consume relatively low power, compared to their electronic-based IP network counterpart. Furthermore, TONs bring also additional benefits in terms of bit rate, signal format, and protocol transparency. However, the absence of O/E/O processing at intermediate nodes in TONs has also some drawbacks. Without regeneration, the quality of the optical signal transmitted from a source to a destination might be degraded due to the effect of physical-layer impairments induced by the transmission through optical fibers and network components. For this reason, routing approaches specifically tailored to account for the effect of physical-layer impairments are needed to avoid setting up connections that don’t satisfy required signal quality at the receiver. Transparency also makes TONs highly vulnerable to deliberate physical-layer attacks. Malicious attacking signals can cause a severe impact on the traffic and for this reason proactive mechanisms, e.g., network design strategies, able to limit their effect are required. Finally, even though energy consumption of transparent WDM networks is lower than in the case of networks processing the traffic at the nodes in the electronic domain, they have the potential to consume even less power. This can be accomplished by targeting the inefficiencies of the current provisioning strategies applied in WDM networks. The work in this thesis addresses the three important aspects mentioned above. In particular, this thesis focuses on routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) strategies specifically devised to target: (i) the lightpath transmission quality, (ii) the network security (i.e., in terms of vulnerability to physical-layer attacks), and (iii) the reduction of the network energy consumption. Our contributions are summarized below. A number of Impairment Constraint Based Routing (ICBR) algorithms have been proposed in the literature to consider physical-layer impairments during the connection provisioning phase. Their objective is to prevent the selection of optical connections (referred to as lightpaths) with poor signal quality. These ICBR approaches always assign each connection request the least impaired lightpath and support only a single threshold of transmission quality, used for all connection requests. However, next generation networks are expected to support a variety of services with disparate requirements for transmission quality. To address this issue, in this thesis we propose an ICBR algorithm supporting differentiation of services at the Bit Error Rate (BER) level, referred to as ICBR-Diff. Our approach takes into account the effect of physical-layer impairments during the connection provisioning phase where various BER thresholds are considered for accepting/blocking connection requests, depending on the signal quality requirements of the connection requests. We tested the proposed ICBR-Diff approach in different network scenarios, including also a fiber heterogeneity. It is shown that it can achieve a significant improvement of network performance in terms of connection blocking, compared to previously published non-differentiated RWA and ICBR algorithms.  Another important challenge to be considered in TONs is their vulnerability to physical-layer attacks. Deliberate attacking signals, e.g., high-power jamming, can cause severe service disruption or even service denial, due to their ability to propagate in the network. Detecting and locating the source of such attacks is difficult, since monitoring must be done in the optical domain, and it is also very expensive. Several attack-aware RWA algorithms have been proposed in the literature to proactively reduce the disruption caused by high-power jamming attacks. However, even with attack-aware network planning mechanisms, the uncontrollable propagation of the attack still remains an issue. To address this problem, we propose the use of power equalizers inside the network nodes in order to limit the propagation of high-power jamming attacks. Because of the high cost of such equipment, we develop a series of heuristics (incl. Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP)) aiming at minimizing the number of power equalizers needed to reduce the network attack vulnerability to a desired level by optimizing the location of the equalizers. Our simulation results show that the equalizer placement obtained by the proposed GRASP approach allows for 50% reduction of the sites with the power equalizers while offering the same level of attack propagation limitation as it is possible to achieve with all nodes having this additional equipment installed. In turn, this potentially yields a significant cost saving.    Energy consumption in TONs has been the target of several studies focusing on the energy-aware and survivable network design problem for both dedicated and shared path protection. However, survivability and energy efficiency in a dynamic provisioning scenario has not been addressed. To fill this gap, in this thesis we focus on the power consumption of survivable WDM network with dynamically provisioned 1:1 dedicated path protected connections. We first investigate the potential energy savings that are achievable by setting all unused protection resources into a lower-power, stand-by state (or sleep mode) during normal network operations. It is shown that in this way the network power consumption can be significantly reduced. Thus, to optimize the energy savings, we propose and evaluate a series of energy-efficient strategies, specifically tailored around the sleep mode functionality. The performance evaluation results reveal the existence of a trade-off between energy saving and connection blocking. Nonetheless, they also show that with the right provisioning strategy it is possible to save a considerable amount of energy with a negligible impact on the connection blocking probability. In order to evaluate the performance of our proposed ICBR-Diff and energy-aware RWA algorithms, we develop two custom-made discrete-event simulators. In addition, the Matlab program of GRASP approach for power equalization placement problem is implemented. / <p>QC 20120508</p>

Optical WDM network is the suitable transport mechanism for ever increasing bandwidth intensive internet applications. The WDM technique transmits the data over several different wavelengths simultaneously through an opticalfiber and the switching is done at wavelength level. The connection between the source and destination is called the light path. Since the WDM network carries huge amount of tra c, any failure can cause massive data loss. Therefore protecting the network against failure is an important issue. Maintaining high level of service availability is an important aspect of service provider. To provide cost effective service, all-optical network is the suitable choice for the service provider. But in all optical network, the signals are forced to remain in optical domain from source to destination. In the firrst part of the thesis, we deal the physical layer impairments (PLIs) aware shared-path provisioning on a wavelength routed all-optical networks. As the signal travels longer distances, the quality of the signal gets degraded and the receiver may not be able to detect the optical signal properly. Our objective is to establish a light path for both the working path and protection path with acceptable signal quality at the receiver. We propose an impairment aware integer linear programming (ILP) and impairment aware heuristic algorithm that takes into account the PLIs. The ILP provides the optimal solution. It is solved using IBM ILOG CPLEX solver. It is intractable for large size net-work. Therefore we propose the heuristic algorithm for large size network. It is evaluated through discrete-event simulation. But the algorithm provides only the suboptimal solution. To know the performance of this algorithm, the simulation result is compared with the optimal solution. We compute total blocking probability, restoration delay, computation time, and connection setup delay with respect to network load for the heuristic algorithm. We compare the performance of shared-path protection with dedicated-path protection and evaluate the percentage of resource saving of shared-path protection over the dedicated-path protection. In the second and third part of the thesis, we address the issues related to flexible-grid optical networks. In wavelength routed optical network, the bandwidth of each wavelength is fixed and rigid. It supports coarse grained tra c grooming and leads to ancient spectrum utilization. To overcome this, flexible-grid optical networks are proposed. It supports flexible bandwidth, and ne grained tra c groom In the second part of the thesis, we address the routing and spectrum allocation (RSA) algorithm for variable-bit-rate data tra c for flexible-grid optical networks. The RSA problem is NP-complete. Therefore a two-step heuristic approach (routing and spectrum allocation) is proposed to solve the RSA problem. The first step is solved by using a classical shortest path algorithm. For the second step we propose two heuristic schemes for frequency-slot allocation: (i) largest number of free frequency-slot allocation scheme and (ii) largest number of free frequency-slot maintaining scheme. As the network load increases, the spectrum is highly fragmented. To mitigate the fragmentation of the spectrum, we propose a xed-path least-fragmentation heuristic algorithm which fragments the spectrum minimally. It also supports varying-bit-rate tra c and also supports dynamic arrival connection requests. Through extensive simulations the proposed algorithms have been evaluated. Our simulation results show that the algorithms perform better in terms of spectrum utilization, blocking probability, and fraction of fragmentation of the spectrum. The spectrum utilization can reach up to a maximum of 92% and that only 71% of the spectrum is fragmented under maximum network load condition. Finally in the third part of the thesis, we discuss PLIs-aware RSA for the transparent exible-grid optical network. In this network, not only the optical signal expected to travel longer distance, but also to support higher line rates, i.e., data rate is increased up to 1 Tb/s. In such a high data rate, the optical signals are more prone to impairments and noises. As the transmission distance increases, optical signals are subject to tra-verse over many bandwidth-variable wavelength cross connects (BV-WXC) and multiple fibber spans due to which the PLIs get accumulated and are added to the optical signal. These accumulated impairments degrades the signal quality to an unacceptable level at the receiver, the quality of transmission falls below the acceptable threshold value, and the receiver may not be able to detect the signal properly. Therefore our objective is to develop an impairment aware RSA algorithm which establishes the QoT satisfied empathy based on the available resources and the quality of the signal available at the receiver. We formulate the PLIs-RSA problem as an ILP that provides an optimal solution. The optimal solution is obtained by solving the ILP using IBM ILOG CPLEX optimization solver. Since ILP is not efficient for large-size networks, we propose a heuristic algorithm for such a large-size networks. The signal power is measured at the receiver and the connection is established only when the signal power lies above the threshold value. The heuristic algorithm is evaluated through discrete-event simulation. It gives the sub-optimal solution. The simulation result is compared with optimal solution. The result shows that heuristic algorithm performs closer to the ILP. We compute the total blocking probability versus the network load for different spectrum allocation schemes. Total blocking probability is the sum of frequency-slot blocking probability and QoT blocking probability. We compute spectrum efficiency for the proposed algorithm. We also compare our algorithm with the existing routing and spectrum allocation algorithm, and the result shows that our algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms in terms of blocking probability and spectrum utilization.