Design of flexible protection plans in survivable WDM networks: An application to PWCE

We propose a new flexible design approach of protection plans in survivable WDM networks by using protection structures with no predefined shapes in order to maximize the protected working capacity in an end-to-end basis. Previous design approaches of survivable WDM based on Protected Working Capacity Envelope (PWCE) have looked at the optimization problem of maximizing the protected capacity on a link basis, independently of the source and destination nodes of the potential traffic. Moreover, those approaches have only investigated the design problem with pre-configured protection cycles (p-cycles).