Domain/Multi-Domain Protection and Provisioning in Optical Networks

Recent developments in the wavelength selective switch (WSS) technology enable multi-degree reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADM) architectures with colorless and directionless switching, which is regarded as a very promising enabler for future reconfigurable wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) mesh networks. However, its asymmetric switching property complicates the optimal routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) problem, which is NP-hard. Most of the existing RWA algorithms do not consider such property. Disruption of services through equipment failures on the lightpaths (output of RWA problem) is consequential as it involves the lost of large amounts of data. Therefore, substantial research efforts are needed to ensure the functional survivability of optical networks, i.e., the continuation of services even when equipment failures occur. Most previous publications have focused on using a protection scheme to guarantee the traffic connections in the event of single link failures. However, protection design against single link failures turns out not to be always sufficient to keep the WDM networks away from many downtime cases as other kinds of failures, such as node failures, dual link failures, triple link failures, etc., become common nowadays. Furthermore, there are challenges to protect large multi-domain optical networks which are composed of several singledomain networks, interconnected by inter-domain links, where the internal topological details of a domain are usually not shared externally. The objective of this thesis is to propose scalable models and solution methods for the above problems. The models enable to approach large problem instances while producing optimal or near optimal solutions with mathematically proven optimality gaps. For this, we rely on the column generation technique which is suitable to solve large scale linear programming problems. For the provisioning problem in optical networks, we propose a new ILP (Integer Linear Programming) model for RWA problem with the objective of maximizing the Grade of Service (GoS). The resulting model is a large scale optimization ILP model, which allows the exact solution of quite large RWA instances, assuming all nodes are asymmetric and with a given switching connectivity matrix. Next, we modify the model and propose a solution for the RWA problem with the objective of finding the best switching connectivity matrix for a given number of ports and a given number of switching connections, while satisfying/maximizing the GoS. For protection in single domain networks, we propose solutions for the protection against multiple failures. Indeed, we extent the protection of a single domain network against multiple failures, using FIPP and FDPP p-cycles. We propose a new generic flow formulation for FDPP p-cycles subject to multiple failures. Our new model ends up with a complex pricing problem, which has an exponential number of constraints due to some subtour elimination constraints. Consequently, in order to efficiently solve the pricing problem, we consider: (i) a hierarchical decomposition of the original pricing problem; (ii) heuristics in order to go around the large number of constraints in the pricing problem. For protection in multi-domain networks, we propose protection schemes against single link failures. Firstly, we propose an optimization model for a centralized protection scheme, assuming that the network management is aware of all the details of the physical topologies of the domains. We then propose a distributed optimization model for protection in multi-domain optical networks, a much more realistic formulation as it is based on the assumption of a distributed network management. Then, we add bandwidth sharing in order to reduce the cost of protection. Bandwidth of each intra-domain link is shared among FIPP p-cycles and p-cycles in a first study, and then among paths for link/path protection in a second study. Finally, we propose parallel strategies in order to obtain solutions for very large multi-domain optical networks. The result of this last study allows the efficent design of a protection scheme for a very large multi-domain network (45 domains), the largest one by far considered in the literature, both with a centralized and distributed scheme.

Keyphrases: Multi-domaine, P-cycles, Multi-Domain, Protection optical networks, Distributed scheme, Parallel scheme/system, Multiple failure, P-cycles