Title: Performance Metrics for Protection Techniques in Optical Networks 

Abstract: Protecting against failures in high speed optical networks is an important area of research. There are several classes of techniques that are commonly used for restoring a network after a failure occurs. Most common of them are Protection Cycles (p-Cycles) and Protection Trees. Some of the techniques protect against link failures, whereas some others protect against failures in network nodes. Some techniques restore the entire end-to-end path, while some other only restore the failed link/node. The objective of this research is to implement several algorithms from each of the classes, and measure their performances in various networks with different characterisitcs (eg. size, nodal degrees etc.) under different failure scenarios (eg. single link failure, multiple failures etc).