An efficient mechanism for dynamic survivable multicast traffic grooming

•We study sub-wavelength level protection for dynamic multicast traffic grooming.•A lightpath-fragmentation based segment shared protection (LF-SSP) scheme is proposed.•By properly splitting primary and backup lightpaths into segments, more efficient resource sharing for both traffic grooming and protection is achieved.•Simulation results verify the good performance of the proposed algorithm.•Effects of a few factors to algorithm performance have also been carefully evaluated.

Recent advances in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks have helped enhance the popularity of multicasting services. However, as a single network failure may disrupt the information transmission to multiple end-users, protecting multicast requests against network failures becomes an important issue in network operation. This paper investigates the sub-wavelength level protection for dynamic multicast traffic grooming. A new method named lightpath-fragmentation based segment shared protection (LF-SSP) scheme is proposed. By carefully splitting primary/backup lightpaths into segments to improve resource sharing for both traffic grooming and protection, LF-SSP aims to minimize the network resources allocated for request protection. Extensive simulations are carried out to compare the performance of LF-SSP to some existing approaches, on sub-wavelength-level as well as wavelength-level multicast protections in different cases. Results show that LF-SSP steadily outperforms these existing methods as long as the network resources are not too limited. Influences of the add/drop port resources and the average number of destinations per connection request on the LF-SSP performance are also evaluated.