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Leaf-looping based multicast

protection algorithm for elastic optical
network

Pan, Meiling, Qiu, Yang

Meiling Pan, Yang Qiu, "Leaf-looping based multicast protection algorithm for
elastic optical network," Proc. SPIE 11435, 2019 International Conference on
Optical Instruments and Technology: Optical Communication and Optical
Signal Processing, 1143504 (12 March 2020); doi: 10.1117/12.2541004

Event: 2019 International Conference on Optical Instruments and Technology,

2019, Beijing, China

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 Leaf-looping based multicast protection algorithm for elastic optical
network
Meiling Pan, and Yang Qiu*
College of Electrical & Information Engineering, Southwest Minzu University, Chengdu, China,
*Corresponding author: yqiu@swun.edu.cn

ABSTRACT

Nowadays, with the increasing complexity of network structure and the application of diverse kinds of services, some
problems, such as multicast-enabled routing, spectrum allocation and traffic protection, have become complicated in
elastic optical networks (EONs). Since the transmission failure in EONs may lead to traffic interruption and thus causes
serious economic loss, their ability to provide different modes of transmission, including unicast and multicast
transmissions, with survivability is highly desirable. In this paper, aiming at improving the service blocking performance
in realizing efficient protection for multicast services in EONs, we propose a leaf-looping based multicast protection
algorithm, namely Multicast Protection with Leaf Loops (MPLL), which divides the destination nodes of multicast
services into several groups according to their distance and constructs one loop for each group to provide protection for
each destination node in the group. In constructing each destination loop, the shortest path algorithm is employed to
minimize the cost of each generated loop. Besides, distance-adaptive spectrum allocation strategy is adopted for resource
assignment to reduce the spectrum consumption in the proposed algorithm. In the research of protection technology,
traditional P-cycle technology is an efficient optical network protection strategy, which has the characteristics of fast
loop recovery speed and effective network recovery capacity. However, the P-cycle protection technology is
pre-computed, which cannot meet the requirements of dynamic recovery. The leaf loops proposed in this paper are
generated dynamically according to the destination nodes generated by each service, and can meet the dynamic business
requirements. In addition, under the same blocking conditions, MPLL saves more path resources than P-cycle based
algorithms in the protection path. Simulation results show that the proposed MPLL algorithm can realize multicast
protection for EONs with low service blocking probability and high flexibility.
key words：Elastic optical network; multicast; service blocking rate; protection

1. INTRODUCTION

The advent of the technology era has promoted the development of Internet technology, but also brought challenges to
the transmission and survivability of the network. The fixed bandwidth model adopted by traditional wavelength division
multiplexing technology has been difficultly to meet the current growing network data traffic. In order to meet the needs
of network development, Elastic Optical Network (EON) carries services by dividing network resources into smaller
granularities, changing the modulation format according to the transmission distance of services [1]. Multicast technology
is a point-to-multipoint high-efficiency data transmission technology. When achieving one-to-many data transmission,
multiple data channels must be established separately, which will waste a large amount of bandwidth resources in the
unicast mode. Multicast transmission is the establishment of a set of multicast trees in the network [2]. At this point, data
transmission to all destination nodes can be achieved only by copying and forwarding one packet at the fork, which
greatly saves bandwidth resources. Network disruptions can be disconnected due to natural disasters and human factors,
such as equipment failures and cable failures,which will cause serious economic losses because of huge amount of
optical network traffic. Therefore, no matter which generation of optical network, protection technology is very
important. Compared with the traditional WDM network, the multicast protection technology in the elastic optical
network is more restricted [3]. And the protection algorithm of the multicast routing is getting more and more attention of
researchers.
The protection strategy of EON is to pre-configure the service before the failure occurs, and the resources are not

2019 International Conference on Optical Instruments and Technology: Optical Communication and Optical
Signal Processing, edited by Jian Chen, Yi Dong, Fabien Bretenaker, Proc. of SPIE Vol. 11435,
1143504 · © 2020 SPIE · CCC code: 0277-786X/20/$21 · doi: 10.1117/12.2541004

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 occupied by other services during the service period. When a network failure occurs, the affected traffic will be
automatically switched to the protection path for resource allocation to achieve service re-transmission. In reference [4],
the author proposed a special path 1+1 protection algorithm named Dedicated Path Protection algorithm (DDP) under the
static Routing and Spectrum Assignment (RSA). And a Shared Backup Path Protection (SBPP) scheme is proposed in the
literature [5]. Although DPP algorithm can guarantee reliable transmission of network, it consumes lots of protection
resources. In contrast, SBPP policies allow working optical paths to share backup spectrum in their common links, as
long as their corresponding primary optical paths do not share any public links. An adaptive distance dynamic RSA
algorithm based on path protection is designed in the paper [6]. This algorithm can select the appropriate modulation level
according to the transmission distance of the service, and reduce the consumption of resources and improve the
spectral efficiency. Literature [7] demonstrated a variety of dynamic multicast service protection strategies and made a
comparison. In literature [8], the Lowest Spectrum-First Segment Protection Algorithm (LSF-SPA) and the Candidate
optical Tree Protection Algorithm (KT-SPA) were proposed to reduce protection switching time and blocking rate. These
two algorithms protected the multicast request by finding a multicast primary tree and a set of backup resources, which
were multicast protection algorithms based on single link failure. In order to be more flexible in solving various link
failures, such as cross-link and multi-link failures, researchers have proposed a new protection technology named p-cycle
that can flexibly handle various faults. When the link fails, the service can be restored by p-cycle [9]. On this basis, the
scholars of the literature [10][11] deeply studied this technology. The proposed heuristic algorithm based on p-cycle, called
Q-based P-Cycles Heuristic (QBPCH), divided the network into a series of p-cycles, providing 100% protection for the
network. It exhibited improved performance in blocking probability when compared to traditional ring coverage
heuristics and Hamiltonian loop methods.
In this paper, we propose a leaf-looping based multicast protection algorithm to improve the service blocking
performance in achieving efficient protection for multicast services in EONs. By dividing the destination nodes of a
multicast service into several groups dynamically and constructing one loop for each group to provide protection for each
destination node in the group, the proposed algorithm realizes protection for each destination node of the multicast
service. In constructing each destination loop, the shortest path algorithm is employed to minimize the cost of each
generated loop. Besides, distance-adaptive spectrum allocation strategy is adopted in resource assignment to reduce the
spectrum consumption in the proposed algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed MPLL algorithm can realize
multicast protection for EONs with low service blocking probability and high flexibility.

2. NETWORK MODEL AND MPLL ALGORITHM

We assume that the composition of the elastic optical network is G(V, E, B, L), where V is the set of nodes and E is the
set of directed links. Each fiber link may accommodate B frequency slots at most, with L=[l(1),l(2),...,l(E)] representing
link lengths for each e ∈ E. We also represent a multicast requests by R = (s, D,N), where s is the source node and D =
(d1, d2, d3...) is a set of destination nodes generated randomly, and N represents the number of nodes. Here, each node in
the network has the ability of multicast capable (MC). When the network generates multicast requests, the multicast tree
is constructed from the source node to all the destination nodes. The spectrum allocation is carried out under the three
constraints: spectrum continuity, spectrum consistency and spectrum connectivity constraints[12]. In elastic optical
networks, the RSA problem has been proved to be a NP hard problem[13]-[15].
In this subsection,we propose a new multicast protection algorithm. In the protection scheme based on leaf loops, MPLL
divides the destination nodes of multicast services into several groups according to their distance and constructs one loop
for each group to provide protection for each destination node in the group. When a multicast request arrives, the number
of loops is determined based on the number of destination nodes generated. We discuss two cases in this algorithm. One
case is that when the number of multicast destination nodes is small, the algorithm will only form a loop.Another case is
when the number of multicast destination nodes is large, the algorithm will construct two or even more loops. Figure 1
illustrates the MPLL scheme that we consider in this paper based on the above basic concepts. We assume that node a in
the graph is the source node. In this case, we suppose the number of destination nodes is 2 or 3, and the multicast
requests generated are assumed to be R={s, D(d1,d2,d3...)}={a,D(c,d)}. It will form a loop between destination
nodes.The loop of this algorithm is based on the shortest path, so the shortest leaf loop in the graph is h→c→d→h.
Figure 1(b) shows the two loops. When the number of destination nodes is four or more, it forms two loops. Here,
suppose the given multicast requests is R={s, D(d1,d2,d3...)}={a,D(c,d,f,g)}. According to the shortest distance of the
loop, the route of the first leaf loop is h→c→d→h and another route is h→f→g→h. As for the non-loop part， For example,
a →h in figure 1(c), we prepare another backup path a→g→h.

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 (a) (b)

(c) (d)
Figure 1. Protection in different situations. (a) with one loop, (b) with two loops, (c) with no loop, (d) DDP algorithm
After the request arrives, we first check whether there are appropriate spectrum blocks on several candidate working
paths. Then we check the resource allocation of the protection path. Table 1 shows the details of the proposed algorithm.

Table 1. Multicast Protection with Leaf Loops algorithm

Algorithm :Multicast Protection with Leaf Loops algorithm
1: Input : Input: G(V, E, B, L), multicast R = {s, D, N}.
2: Output : true if there are enough FSs, false if not.
3: flag = TURE;
4 : for each request do
5 : calculate the number of destination nodes N;
6 : if(N<=3) then
7: Determine the number of loops;
8: construct the working tree by the shortest path;
9: if (there are not enough FSs on all the links) then
10: mark R = {s, D, N} blocked;
11: flag = FALSE;
12: end
13: if (flag) then
14: Calculate the path of loops and the non-loops backup path;
15: if (there are not enough FSs on all the links) then
16: mark R = {s, D, N} blocked;
17: flag = FALSE;
18: end
19: end
20: else (N>3) then
21: Repeat steps 7-19;
22: end
23: end

We will compare MPLL algorithm with the Dedicated Path Protection algorithm (DDP). In DPP algorithm,each

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 connection has its own backup resources, so it can provide 100% protection. The implementation in the multicast is to
back up the transmission by forming a protected multicast tree which does not intersect the path of the multicast tree.
Figure 1(d) shows the path selection of DDP algorithm. Suppose the request is R={s, D(d1,d2,d3...)}={a,D(c,d)}as shown
in figure 1, the protection path of DDP algorithm is a→b→c and a→g→f→e→d. It can be seen that it uses a lot of path
resources.

3. SIMULATION RESULTS

3.1 Simulation setup

Figure 2. Network topology of NSFNET

In this paper, the performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed by simulating the NSFNET network with 14 nodes
and 22 edges. There are 320 frequency slots per fiber in the network, and the bandwidth of each frequency slot is 12.5
GHz. The source node and destination nodes of the service request obey the uniform distribution, the arrival of the
service request obeys the Poisson distribution of the parameter λ, and the service duration obeys the exponential
distribution of the parameter 1/µ. The service size in the network is generated from {100,150,300}. Adaptive
distance-modulation technique is employed in this simulation with the candidate modulation formats as BPSK, QPSK,
8QAM and 16QAM. In the simulation, the number of candidates for multicast tree is three.
3.2 Simulation result
The main purpose of this simulation is to compare the performance of different protection algorithms. We use blocking
rate as the main index to evaluate the performance of the algorithm. At the same time, we define a index, Spectrum
Alignment Rate (SAR), to measure the spectrum alignment after service accommodation. If the frequency gap state at the
same location in all links is the same, it is counted. In the formula, we count the available alignment spectrum number as
variable An, and set the total spectrum number as variable Tn. The mathematical expression is expressed as follows：
(1)

The graphs show the results of bandwidth blocking rate and available alignment spectrum under different traffic loads.
As we can observe from figure 3, when the traffic load is low, the performance of both algorithms is better and the
blocking rate of both algorithms is relatively low. However, in order to achieve the protection function, BBP will
increase rapidly with the increase of traffic load. DPP algorithm provides 1+1 protection and uses more bandwidth
resources, which leads to higher blocking rate. In the case of blocking rate, we can see that MPLL algorithm is always
better than DDP algorithm. This is due to the MPLL algorithm using fewer protection path resources. MPLL algorithm
significantly improves the performance of blocking rate reduction.
Figure 4 illustrates how the available spectrum alignment rate change under different traffic loads. The SAR of DDP
algorithm is obviously lower than that of MPLL, because MPLL algorithm saves a lot of backup resource paths. As the
load increases, DDP algorithm will use more and more backup protection resources than MPLL algorithm, DDP
algorithm will use more and more backup protection resources, and the gap in bandwidth usage will be larger. Therefore,
we can see that with the increase of traffic, the SAR of MPLL algorithm obviously has greater advantages. The
simulation results validate the superiority of MPLL algorithm.

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 Figure 3. Service blocking probability

Figure 4. Available spectrum alignment rate

4. CONCLUSION

In this paper, we propose a leaf-looping based multicast protection algorithm to improve the service blocking
performance in realizing efficient protection for multicast services in EONs. By dividing the destination nodes of a
multicast service into several groups dynamically and constructing one loop for each group to provide protection for each
destination node in the group, the proposed algorithm realizes protection for each destination node of the multicast
service.Simulation results show that the proposed MPLL algorithm can realize multicast protection for EONs with low
service blocking probability and high flexibility.

5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was partly supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61705190), and the Fundamental
Research Funds for the Central Universities, Southwest University for Nationalities (No. 2018HQZZ26).

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