Automatic protection switching for p-cycles in WDM networks

p-Cycle recovery relies on a protection switching protocol. We detail several issues for such a protocol taking the evolution from ring networks to p-cycles into account. In particular, we propose and evaluate a protocol enhancement to provide means for node failure protection. For the evaluation, we describe an integer linear program, which is applied to network design case studies, and formulate availability models for p-cycles. The case studies show that the protocol enhancement improves availability at marginal additional design cost.