Survivability of interconnected ring networks

Abstract

<i>Survivability</i> is a means of introducing redundancy in a network architecture which is utilized to maintain communication capability under failure conditions. The need for survivability exists in most communication networks. Fiber optic networks concentrate large amounts of traffic within a few spans, using their high capacity to achieve a cost advantage. It is crucial to incorporate survivability at minimum cost in the design of such networks. This problem is conventionally tackled using techniques such as <i>Automatic Protection Switching</i> (APS), <i>Dual homing and Self-Healing Ring</i> (SHR). These techniques, although relatively simple to implement, are not efficient in utilizing network capacity. Interconnected ring topologies use the network capacity more efficiently at the expense of complex fault detection and routing methodologies. The <i>toroidal grid</i> is shown to be an optimized form of a generalized survivable interconnected ring topology. It is shown to have significantly lower capacity requirements than the simple self healing ring networks. The <i>modified toroidal</i> grid is an improvement on the toroidal grid because it has a planar graph and shorter average link length. A quantity called <i>link-traffic summation</i> is defined as a metric of total link capacity requirement in a network. Analytical values for link-traffic summation are obtained for simple ring, generalized interconnected ring, toroidal grid and modified toroidal grid networks. Simulations are performed for the modified toroidal grid and their results are compared with the analytical values obtained.