Protection and Restoration From Link Failures in DWDM Networks: A Cross-Layer Study

Protection against failure in high bandwidth optical networks can prevent significant potential losses of data but at the same time it requires a considerable fraction of the network resources to be reserved for it. Moreover, in optical networks suffering from physical layer impairments, inefficient use of network resources leads to significant increase in the blocking probability and higher vulnerability due to degradation of the QoT (Quality of Transmission) in the network. This trade offs call for the need to consider the physical layer impairments in designing higher layer protection schemes, i.e., a QoT-aware or cross-layer design.