Seminar: Optimal Design of Ethernet Ring Protection

Dr. Samir Sebbah (Oracle America & CISSE Concordia University)

Thursday, June 20, 2013, 10:00 a.m, EV 3.309

Abstract

Ethernet Ring Protection (ERP) has recently emerged to provide protection switching in Ethernet networks with sub-50 ms failover capabilities. In addition to Ethernet’s cost-effectiveness and simplicity, ERP’s promise to also provide protection in mesh packet transport networks positions Ethernet as a prominent competitor to conventional SONET/SDH and the technology of choice for carrier networks. Higher service availability, however, in ERP has been challenged by the issue of network partitioning and contention for shared capacity caused by concurrent failures. In this talk, we show that in a network designed to withstand only single-link failures, the network services usually suffer from two outage categories subject to dual-link failures. We address the problem of minimal capacity network design to provide high service availability against dual-link failures. We cast this design problem as an optimization one and show that higher service availability can be achieved by proper RPL (Ring Protection Link) placement and ring hierarchy selection with an objective of maximizing the network flow under any dual-link failure. Our design achieves minimal capacity allocation that minimizes the number of service outages therefore achieving higher service availability. Numerical evaluations as well as comparisons are carried out which show the effectiveness (in terms allocated capacity and service outages) of the presented design approach.

Bio

Dr. Samir Sebbah is a Senior R&D Scientist with Oracle America, where he has been working on hybrid optimization technologies using constraint programming and operations research since he joined the company in August 2012. He is also an adjunct assistant professor with CISSE Concordia University. During Oct 2010-August 2012 he held an NSERC Visiting Fellowship at Defence R&D Canada in Ottawa. He received a M.Sc. degree from the University of Paris 8 in computer Science and Operation Research and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Concordia University in 2010. His research interests are in networking, focusing on design of large-scale telecommunications systems. In the networking arena, he has worked on design of survivable optical networks and wireless networks. He has explored the impact of failures in wavelength division multiplexing networks, and investigated large-scale algorithms to support multiple classes of recovery and protection. He has also investigated the trade-off between the service availability and the capital/operating costs in survivable networks. As adjunct assistant professor with CIISE Dept., Concordia University, Dr. Sebbah is involved in projects on design and optimization of Ethernet Ring Protection Networks, Wireless Networks, and Virtual Local Area Networks.

Dr. Sebbah is the co-author of over thirty papers on networking and computer systems. He is an active reviewer for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Computer Communications, and IEEE Transactions on Networking. He was the Program co-Chair for the 2010 INFORMS Conference on Telecommunications (Montreal 2010). His paper (with Dr. Brigitte Jaumard) "A resilient transparent optical network design with a preconfigured extended-tree scheme" received the best paper award of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Communications Conference in optical networking.