Optical quorum cycles for efficient communication

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel optical network routing method using quorum set theory to enhance efficiency, fault tolerance, and support for dynamic unicast and multicast communications without prior request modeling.

Contribution

It applies quorum set theory to optical network routing, enabling efficient, fault-tolerant unicast and multicast communication in a distributed manner.

Findings

Over 99% fault coverage with the proposed method

Supports dynamic unicast and multicast without prior request knowledge

Enhanced cycle finding algorithm improves fault tolerance

Abstract

Many optical networks face heterogeneous communication requests requiring topologies to be efficient and fault tolerant. For efficiency and distributed control, it is common in distributed systems and algorithms to group nodes into intersecting sets referred to as quorum sets. We show efficiency and distributed control can also be accomplished in optical network routing by applying the same established quorum set theory. Cycle-based optical network routing, whether using SONET rings or p-cycles, provides the sufficient reliability in the network. Light-trails forming a cycle allow broadcasts within a cycle to be used for efficient multicasts. Cyclic quorum sets also have all pairs of nodes occurring in one or more quorums, so efficient, arbitrary unicast communication can occur between any two nodes. Efficient broadcasts to all network nodes are possible by a node broadcasting to all quorum cycles to which it belongs (O(sqrt(N))). In this paper, we propose applying the distributed efficiency of the quorum sets to routing optical cycles based on light-trails. With this new method of topology construction, unicast and multicast communication requests do not need to be known or even modeled a priori. Additionally, in the presence of network link faults, greater than 99 % average coverage enables the continued operation of nearly all arbitrary unicast and multicast requests in the network. Finally, to further improve the fault coverage, an augmentation to the ECBRA cycle finding algorithm is proposed.