Proactive Reconfiguration of Optical Transport Networks with Minimum Service Disruption Time

In communication networks, the dynamic setup and termination of services may result in sub-optimal resource utilization states that cause traffic blocking. Network reconfigurations, which reroute existing services through optimal paths, tackle this issue. Reconfigurations may however cause inevitable service disruptions, resulting in costly penalties associated with service level agreement (SLA) violations. Existing solutions to this problem mainly focus on reconfiguration algorithms that only minimize the number of service disruptions. These strategies are however oblivious to the resulting disruption periods, which have a more harmful impact on the service availability. This paper proposes a solution to this problem within the context of optical transport networks (OTN), which must enforce stringent service availability guarantees. Our approach minimizes both the number of service disruptions and their corresponding durations, thereby maximizing service availability during the reconfiguration process. Results on selected network scenarios show that, in the worst case, the proposed method reduces the service disruption periods by a factor of 66.7% w.r.t a state-of-the-art baseline algorithm.