Availability of survivable Valiant load balancing (VLB) networks over optical networks

Valiant load balancing (VLB) network has been proposed as a capacity-efficient solution to handle highly dynamic traffic in future backbone networks. In this paper, we study the availability of VLB networks that are overlaid over an optical infrastructure. The main challenges in such a context arise from the unique routing and protection scheme that goes beyond the definition of conventional connection-level service availability as well as the logical link failure correlation that prohibits the use of traditional analytical methods. We propose a network-level availability model to compute the probability that a VLB network is congestion-free under all traffic patterns. Numerical results show that with a proper truncation level, our calculation on availability can be accelerated significantly by generating tight lower and upper bounds. Our main finding is that physical link sharing in a two-layer setting degrades the network availability drastically by several orders of magnitude due to the full mesh requirement for VLB networks, and may remove the capacity efficiency advantage of VLB networks.