Abstract
A crucial aspect in the development of a fault management system is the selection of backup paths. The main issue in this selection is a tradeoff between the resource consumption and the minimization of failure recovery time, link failure, and packet loss. In this paper, a general QoS backup protection optimization policy applicable to a wide range of network situations and traffic types is proposed. A comparison between the proposed policy and the conventional protection backup methods is performed. The numerical results show a significant improvement of the QoS protection over conventional protection backup methods at variable protection parameters, network constraints and traffic types.