Abstract: Ongoing growth in transport demand is served while deferring or eliminating expenditure for additional capacity by reclaiming the protection capacity and inefficiently used working capacity in existing multi-ring network. Reclamation is through re-design of the routing and restoration in the network using mesh principles within the pre-existing ring capacities. The installed working and protection capacity of existing rings is viewed as a sunk investment, an existing resource, to be “mined” and incorporated into a mesh-operated network that serves both existing and ongoing growth. A complete double or even tripling of demand could be supported with little or no additional capacity investment through the period of ring-to mesh conversion by ring-mining. An existing ring set may be converted to a target architecture of “p-cycles” instead of a span-restorable mesh, through placement of straddling span interface units to convert ring ADMs to p-cycle nodal elements.

Abstract: Ongoing growth in transport demand is served while deferring or eliminating expenditure for additional capacity by reclaiming the protection capacity and inefficiently used working capacity in existing multi-ring network. Reclamation is through re-design of the routing and restoration in the network using mesh principles within the pre-existing ring capacities. The installed working and protection capacity of existing rings is viewed as a sunk investment, an existing resource, to be “mined” and incorporated into a mesh- operated network that serves both existing and ongoing growth. Three ways of approaching the idea are given. The last is a detailed planning model for minimum cost evolution out to a given total growth multiplier (or a scenario of individual future growth multipliers on each O-D pair) that considers the costs of new mesh capacity additions, nodal costs for mesh access to existing ring working and protection capacity and selective ADM conversions and re-use decisions.