A New Approach for Designing the Next Generation Survivable Backbone Network

Abstract:
There is a great need to devise new planning methodology to deal with the tremendously growing but highly unpredictable IP traffic. Two key requirements for future backbone networks are dynamic service provisioning and full survivability. We introduce a new survivable network concept called the “Generalized Survivable Network” (GSN) to satisfy these two requirements. GSN is a generalization of the non-blocking network concept to the survivable network models and has the special property that it remains survivable no matter how traffic is provisioned dynamically, as long as the input and output capacity constraints at the nodes remained unchanged. GSN is also deterministic and easy to characterize. GSN can be categorized into wide-sense nonblocking and rearrangeably non-blocking. We present a complete mathematical framework for designing both types of GSN. We carried out numerical computations for different networks to demonstrate the validity of the GSN concept and show that the cost of a GSN is only a fraction (within a factor of 2) more than a single-period survivable network.