Exploiting Excess Capacity to Improve Robustness of WDM Mesh Networks

Excess capacity (EC) is the unused capacity in a network. Excess capacity management techniques exploit the EC to improve the network performance. In this paper we propose EC management techniques that exploit EC to improve all the three performance metrics. EC management techniques differ in two respects: when connections are migrated from one protection scheme to another, and which connections are migrated. Specifically, Lazy techniques migrate connections only when necessary, whereas Proactive techniques migrate connections in advance to free up capacity. Partial Backup Reprovisioning (PBR) techniques try to migrate a subset of connections, whereas Global Backup Reprovisioning (GBR) techniques migrate all connections