Abstract
Network survivability is defined as the ability of a network to maintain an acceptable level of network performance in the presence of failures. Quantifying network survivability through pure network performance tends to be optimistic since it ignores the availability of the resources of the network at the time of failure. On the other hand, pure availability analysis tends to be too conservative since performance considerations are not taken into account. In this paper, a composite model to accurately measure the survivability of slotted multi-fiber optical packet switching networks is proposed. The end-to-end performance of multi-fiber slotted optical packet switched networks as well as the steady-state availability of the network are modeled. These two models are combined to construct a hierarchical network survivability model. The study shows that the use of a multiple-fiber network configuration provides additional network capacity and increases network survivability. Also, it shows that the use of wavelength conversion increases survivability by resolving the wavelength contention problem.