Survivable multipath routing of anycast and unicast traffic in elastic optical networks

In this paper, we focus on the survivability of elastic optical networks (EONs) that jointly support two types of traffic demands: unicast and anycast. To provide network survivability, we apply multipath routing; i.e., we allow the splitting of a demand into a number of routing paths if the paths' combination guarantees the realization of a specific demand volume in the case of a single link failure. We formulate the corresponding optimization problem as an integer linear program (ILP) and propose a survivable multipath allocation (SMA) algorithm to solve the problem in a reasonable amount of time. Next, we perform numerical experiments to compare the efficiency (ability to provide a good-quality solution in a reasonable amount of time) of the ILP model and SMA as well as to evaluate the impact of survivable multipath routing on the objective defined as a maximum spectrum usage in EONs. Our results show that the SMA method finds good-quality solutions in a reasonable amount of time and that survivable multipath routing in EONs requires additional spectrum resources, up to 45%. However, the amount of additional resources depends on the required protection level, amount of anycast traffic, the maximum number of paths used for demand realization, and the considered network topology.