Quasi-Dedicated Path Protection in OFDM Networks

Optical networks have become the de-facto standard for backbone networks due to the large bandwidth, fault-tolerance and other advantages of optical communication. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has been proposed recently as a promising technology to improve the utilization of the huge bandwidth of optical fibers. When designing optical networks, path protection is a well-known approach to ensure reliable communication, even in the presence of faults in the network. In this research we have proposed a approach that attempts to increase the throughput of optical networks using OFDM, by reconfiguring the backup lightpaths when the network is heavily congested. When a network cannot handle a new request for communication, we reconfigure the existing backup paths to enable the setting up of a primary lightpath and a backup lightpath to handle the new request. We have studied the network performance using simulation