This lecture will initially discuss the nature and importance of the transport network survivability problem in general and discuss the key concepts of most of the currently known approaches to the problem. This will include automatic protection switching systems, line and path-switched rings, distributed span and path mesh restoration, and shared-backup path protection. The relatively new concept of p-Cycles will then be treated in some depth. This will include some of the interesting history of p-cycles, the operational concept for span and path-protecting p-cycles, the basic design problem for p-cycles, and the surprising combination of attractive features that p-cycles provide. Recent research on multiple failure survivability, multiple service priorities, dynamic provisioning, node protection, network evolution, design methods and self-organization will be discussed in closing.

Wayne Grover is a Fellow of the IEEE for his work on "survivable and self-organizing networks" has produced 33 patented inventions and highly cited papers in four separate fields in telecommunications to date. He is most widely recognized for his work in restorable networks design and operation. For nearly 20 years he has researched and developed the concepts of self-healing and self-organizing transport networks, and recently fathered the "p-cycles" concept. Other recent innovations in networking include the "protected working capacity envelope" concept and framework within which nodes of a dynamic transport network solve their own ongoing provisioning and reconfiguration problem optimally through a synchronous distributed approach using on-line solution of ILP problem instances in each node. He is also the author of Mesh-based Survivable Networks (Prentice-Hall, 2004) and a co-author of Next Generation Transport Networks: Data, Management and Control Planes (Springer Science, 2005). He is now working on a book on "p-cycles." Previously Dr. Grover played a founding role in the start-up of the TRLabs consortium in Canada where he now serves as Chief Scientist, Network Systems Research and as a Professor in the University of Alberta's ECE Department. Current research interests focus on optical network design optimization, new survivability architectures including p-cycles, pre-cross-connected shared protection architectures for transparent optical networks and new approaches to operation and ongoing re-optimization of dynamic transport networks.