This paper investigates the problem of dynamic protected lightpath services provisioning in optical mesh networks employing wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). A variety of schemes for dynamic protected services provisioning have been proposed, supporting a range of tradeoffs among restoration speed, capacity efficiency, and scalability. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, called p-cycles-based maximum protected working capacity envelope (PC-MPWCE), which can offer an attractive combination of features: ring-like speed, mesh-like capacity efficiency, and good scalability. To evaluate the performance of PC-MPWCE, we compare it via simulation with 1+1 automatic protection switching (APS) and two well-known shared backup path protection (SBPP) on NSFNET. Our simulation results show that PC-MPWCE can achieve much better blocking performance than 1+1 APS, and perform the similar blocking performance and capacity efficiency as SBPP.

In this paper, an inner wavelength method is proposed to enlarge buffering capacity of shared fiber delay line buffers. In addition, an optical packet switch called extended shared buffer type optical packet switch (extended SB-OPS) is proposed to realize the inner wavelength method. In order to further improve performance of extended SB-OPS, a greedy algorithm based on inner wavelength method is introduced. The performance of extended SB-OPS is evaluated by simulation experiments.

In this paper, a novel concept of multi-granularity p-cycle is proposed. In conventional p-cycle concept, all on-cycle spans have the same capacity. However, in multi-granularity p-cycle, each on-cycle span could have different capacity. Results show that multi-granularity p-cycles are much more capacity-efficient and cost-effective than conventional p-cycles. We also propose two protection switching schemes for all types of p-cycle networks. One is wrapping protection, in which only two end nodes do real-time switching when a span failure happens. The other is steering protection, in which at most four nodes do real-time switching when a span fails. In steering protection switching scheme, the restoration path for the failure traffic demand has the least hops.