Survivability enhancement of backbone optical networks leveraging seismic zone information

Abstract

Occurrences of natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc., at different places around the world result in severe communication service disruptions due to network component (node/link) failures. In current backbone optical networks, connections are survived by means of protection and restoration methods in event of single or multiple node/link failures. These conventional methods consume additional spectral resources, however, cannot provide high survivability in event of multiple component failures that may result due to natural disasters such as earthquakes. Earthquakes have been a major cause of telecommunication service disruption in the past. With the advancements in seismology, the prediction of an earthquake is becoming more accurate. In this work, a seismic zone aware node relocation (SZANR) scheme has been proposed to enhance the optical network survivability against multiple link failure caused due to earthquakes. The proposed SZANR scheme leverages the seismic zone classification made available by meteorological departments, and perform node relocation of existing optical networks. The relocation has been performed by minute changes in node locations under several constraints which ensure that the functioning and reach of backbone optical networks is not affected. The performance analysis of the proposed SZANR has been done considering actual information made available by the Indian meteorological department (IMD) on seismic zones, and earthquakes occurred in the past. Simulations performed on the real-world Indian RailTel optical network show that up to 98.25% survivability against earthquakes can be achieved using the proposed SZANR. Moreover, network survivability can be improved by 88.2% using the proposed SZANR in conjunction with the conventional dedicated path protection (DPP). © 2017 IEEE.