Abstract: This article presents a Continuous-Time Markov Chain model to characterise the propagation of failures in optical GMPLS rings. In order to characterize the behaviour of failure propagation epidemic-based models are commonly used. However, the existing epidemic models do not take into account the specific features of a multilayer network environment. A node failure in GMPLS-based networks can affect: Control Plane and Data plane reporting different failures scenarios. Consequently, an extended generic epidemic model called SID is proposed, in order to cover multiple failures and recovered states in a GMPLS Multilayer scenario. The CTMC model takes into account the SID model and provides a set of design rules to specify the values of repair rates required to achieve a given service availability, assuming a certain infection and disable rate.The work described in this paper was carried out with the support of the BONE
project (''Building the Future Optical Network in Europe''), a Network of Excellence
funded by the European Commission through the 7th ICT-Framework Programme.
Additionally, the authors would like to thank the support of the T2C2 Spanish project
(under code TIN2008-06739-C04-01) and the Madrid Community through the
MEDIANET project (S-2009/TIC-1468) to the development of this work.
This work is partially supported by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation
project TEC 2009-10724 and by Generalitat de Catalunya research support program
(SGR-1202).Publicad