Feature Issue on AvailabilityProtection of communication against network failures is becoming increasingly important, and here we present what we believe to be the most capacity-efficient protection method possible, the complete rerouting protection method, when we require that all communication should be restored in the case of a single link network failure. We present a linear programming model of the protection method and a column-generation algorithm. For six real-world networks, the minimal restoration overbuild network capacity is between 13% and 78%. We further study the importance of the density of the network, derive analytical bounds, and study methods to speed up the column-generation algorithm. We expect that the suggested protection method will be used for calculating lower bounds required for protection, but not as a functioning protection method.
© 2006 Optical Society of AmericaPDF Article