Business Case for Shared Mesh Protection

Current approaches to network resiliency are inadequate to meet evolving network performance and cost requirements. Existing schemes such as 1+1 protection meet the sub 50 ms performance requirement but only protect against single failures and are too costly. Best-effort approaches such as software-based GMPLS mesh restoration are cost effective, handle multiple failures but do not meet the sub 50 ms performance requirement. MPLS FRR can protect against multiple failures and achieve local 50 ms performance but requires longer time frames for end-to-end convergence and uses more costly router ports. 

Infinera is implementing a new standards-based approach called Shared Mesh Protection (SMP) for network resiliency. ACG Research conducted a total cost of ownership (TCO) comparison of SMP versus 1+1 protection. The comparison is made for the TCO of line-side 100 Gbps WDM interfaces using a national reference transport network and a five-year study. It models traffic patterns to/from data centers, cable landing sites, and metro areas. Traffic increases at 85 percent CAGR over the study period. The comparison shows that the TCO for protection resources in SMP is 27 percent less as compared to 1+1 protection. The TCO savings result from the use of shared bandwidth managed by network intelligence to protect against multiple failures versus dedicated backup resources for single failure protection used by 1+1.

Click here to download Michael Kennedy's total cost of ownership whitepaper.

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Michael Kennedy

mkennedy@acgresearch.net
www.acgresearch

Meshed Optical Topologies

As network architectures become more agile and dynamic, they enable faster provisioning and service creation. However, migration issues are increasingly apparent as operators move from static and point-to-point networks to transparent mesh architectures that deploy ROADMs, optical cross-connects and dynamic control planes.

Operators are discussing mesh topologies and dynamic networks but are overlooking important technical and physical issues. Power transients and chromatic dispersion effects are far more prominent at higher bit rates and in mesh topologies. Specifically, standard mitigation is simply not sufficient or sophisticated enough to handle the increased rollout of high-capacity links at 40G and 100G in transparent mesh networks.

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Eve Griliches

egriliches@acgresearch.net
www.acgresearch