Differentiated quality of protection: An energy- and spectral-efficient resilience scheme for survivable static and dynamic optical transport networks with fixed- and flexible-grid

Optical transport networks are being continuously upgraded to cope with the ever increasing capacity requirements. Improving the energy- and spectral-efficiency while maintaining high service availability is emerging as a strategic priority for the operators. This article proposes a differentiated quality of protection (Diff QoP) scheme to achieve this goal by matching the actual client/service requirements for network protection. This strategy can be especially valuable in future networks where heterogeneous services and users with different requirements will coexist in the network. The applicability of such scheme is evaluated in different network and traffic scenarios, ranging from the conventional current static wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) networks to the innovative flexible-grid elastic optical networks (EON).Simulations carried out on realistic deployment scenarios operated with static and dynamic traffic network operations allowed us to quantitatively analyze the potential energy- and spectral-efficiency improvements that a Diff QoP scheme can provide to telecommunication operators with respect to the common dedicated protection 1+1 (DP 1+1).