FASTeR: Sub-50ms Shared Restoration in Mesh Networks

Shared restoration is key to realizing the bandwidth savings offered by mesh networking. In order to be viable, restoration has to be effected very fast - typically, within 50ms after failure. However, the traditional schemes involve signaling and cross-connect setups and take excessive durations. In this paper, we describe a novel restoration scheme called FASTeR which dramatically reduces restoration times by eliminating these operations. It involves a novel {em Select-Multicast} feature of the cross-connects and can be applied to all-optical or electrical networks. We extend the GMPLS standard to support this scheme. We present experimental results evaluating this scheme and show that a small multicasting degree is sufficient in practice.