PROtection with MultIple SEgments (PROMISE)

Major challenges in designing a survivable network include how to allocate minimal amounts of spare resources using scalable algorithms, and how to enable quick recovery, in case a failure occurs. Existing efforts in achieving maximal bandwidth effi ciency often resort to time-consuming integer linear programming (ILP) which is not tractable/feasible for large-scale networks. Other heuristic approaches sacrifice bandwidth efficiency, or trade recovery time for bandwidth efficiency.

This inve ntion describes a novel survivability framework that combines the best of existing link and path protection schemes (e.g., bandwidth, efficiency and fast recovery). Using innovative path determination and segmentation algorithms, this protection sch eme can achieve even better bandwidth efficiency than shared path protection, but with a shorter recovery time. These heuristic-based algorithms are ultra-fast and therefore applicable to very large networks, while being able to obtain close-to-opti mal results. The ILP formulation-based algorithms use a novel link-labeling scheme to drastically reduce the number of variables and thus can run fast enough for medium-size networks (a few hundred nodes).

Advantages of the technology:
Fast re covery with highest bandwidth efficiency (better than shared path protection). More resilient, tolerates more multiple failures than path protection (with the same or lower bandwidth consumption)
Can succeed when other fail.

This technology can be applied to networking technologies such as: IP, ATM, SONET, G-MPLS, WDM and other high-speed link layers under the evolving G-MPLS framework.

Categories: Optics Patents Issues: 7,398,321

Patents:
US 7,398,321

Type of Offer: Licensing



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