Auxiliary graph based protection for survivable Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) access network considering different levels of failures

Survivability is one of the key issues in Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) access network because network component failures may cause huge data loss, especially when the failures in optical back-end. According to the failure severity, we categorize the failures in optical back-end into two levels, that is, Optical-Network-Unit (ONU)-level failure and segment-level failure. In this paper, instead of the expensive fiber duplication approach traditionally, we propose a novel protection approach for FiWi against ONU-level failure by assigning each ONU several alternate ONUs in the same segment and against the segment-level failure by deploying backup fibers among different segments. On one hand, we optimize the assignment of alternate ONUs, aiming to maximize the amount of protected traffic and minimize the number of wireless hops. On the other hand, we optimize the deployment of backup fibers, aiming to maximize the amount of protected traffic and minimize the length of backup fibers. We mathematically formulate these two objectives as Maximum Protection and Minimum Hops Number (MPMHN) problem and the Maximum Protection and Minimum backup Fibers Length (MPMFL) problem, respectively. An efficient algorithm called Auxiliary Graph based Protection (AGP) is proposed to solve the MPMHN and MPMFL problems. In the simulation, we investigate the performance of AGP in various scenarios and demonstrate the cost-efficiency of the proposed protection approach. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.