Optimal monitoring equipment placement for fault and attack location in transparent optical networks

Abstract

Last decade, network security has become a very sensitive and important topic for equipment manufacturers and network operators. Physical layer security in opaque optical networks relies on the information obtained at the opaque nodes where the signal is electronically regenerated. However, in transparent optical networks, security is even more complex since the optical signals are not regenerated and, therefore, faults and attacks are more difficult to be detected and isolated. Our work deals with the study of the optical placement of monitoring equipment which may help operators to optimize the investment on their equipment while increasing the accuracy to locate the faults and attacks (so-called failures). For this purpose, we have extended our Transparent Failure Location Algorithm (TFLA), which is able to locate failure(s) in transparent optical networks in presence of false and/or lost alarms to propose an optimal location for new monitoring equipment, and tested it for the Pan-European network. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2004.