List of shared risk link groups representing regional failures with limited size

Abstract

Shared Risk Link Group (SRLG) is a failure the network is prepared for, which contains a set of links subject to a common risk of single failure. During planning a backbone network, the list of SRLGs must be defined very carefully, because leaving out one likely failure event will significantly degrade the observed reliability of the network. Regional failures are manifested at multiple locations of the network, which are physically close to each other. In this paper we show that operators should prepare a network for only a small number of possible regional failure events. In particular, we give a fast systematic approach to generate the list of SRLGs that cover every possible circular disk failure of a given radius r. We show that this list has O((n + x)σ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">r</sub> ) SRLGs, where n is the number of nodes in the network, x is the number of link crossings, and σ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">r</sub> is the maximal number of links that could be hit by a disk failure of radius r. Finally through extensive simulations we show that this list in practice has size of ≈ 1.2 n.