Effectiveness of dynamic reconfiguration of path protection for Carrier's backbone network

Path protection is essential in a carrier's backbone transport network that requires high reliability. Furthermore, it is preferable for a carrier to repair failed facilities as quickly as possible because path protection is not effective against multiple failures, which impair both primary and secondary paths at the same time. To reduce the operating expenditure involved in quick repair, a dynamic reconfiguration of path protection was proposed and its performance was evaluated in a scenario where failure occurs on a link-by-link basis. For this study, we evaluated the amount of bandwidth necessary for the dynamic reconfiguration of path protection in realistic failure scenarios, in which some paths accommodated in a link are impaired due to failure of a transponder module. Through simulation experiments, we confirm that the success ratio of dynamic reconfiguration of path protection amounts to 72% in case that half the capacity of a transponder is available as a backup on every link and 83% in case full capacity of a transponder is available as a backup on every link.