Slice-Aware Service Restoration with Recovery Trucks for Optical Metro-Access Networks

Next-generation optical metro-access networks are expected to support end-to-end virtual network slices for critical 5G services. However, disasters affecting physical infrastructures upon which network slices are mapped can cause significant disruption in these services. Operators can deploy recovery units or trucks to restore services based on slice requirements. In this study, we investigate the problem of slice-aware service restoration in metro-access networks with specialized recovery trucks to restore services after a disaster failure. We model the problem based on classical vehicle-routing problem to find optimal routes for recovery trucks to failure sites to provide temporary backup service until the network components are re-paired. Our proposed slice-aware service-restoration approach is formulated as a mixed integer linear program with the objective to minimize penalty of service disruption across different network slices. We compare our slice-aware approach with a slice-unaware approach and show that our proposed approach can achieve significant reduction in service-disruption penalty.