Study of fault tolerance in networks and distributed systems had its origins in early works in digital system design and testing. Over the years several dimensions of this area have emerged, encompassing almost all areas in electrical engineering, computer engineering and computer systems. Study of fault tolerance in WDM optical networks is a recent addition to the growing list of areas of interest in fault tolerance research.
This project is aimed at advancing the state of art of research in fault tolerance theory for optical networks. Research will be carried out in two broad areas: Robust multiple failure recovery and multilayer survivability. By multilayer survivability we refer to the broad class of problems that involve logical topology design taking the impact of multiple failures in the physical topology into consideration. By robustness of a recovery mechanism, we refer to the ability of the recovery method to provide protection against a large number of multiple failures.
We shall develop innovative algorithmic approaches based on advanced optimization techniques such as meta heuristics and approximation techniques, for problems in the three broad areas: (1) Quality of protection and robustness enhancement of single failure recovery methods, (2) Design of highly robust multiple failure recovery mechanisms and (3) Protection Interoperable design.
