Hybrid protection and restoration strategy for disaster-resilient EONs with differentiated degradation

Elastic Optical Networks (EONs) are considered a promising architecture for next-generation optical transport systems. Nevertheless, failure events can lead to significant data loss, motivating the development of advanced protection and restoration mechanisms. This work introduces a survivability strategy that enables controlled bandwidth degradation and restoration delay for low-priority connections, allowing them to be rerouted through the backup paths reserved for high-priority traffic. Comparative evaluations against conventional dedicated backup-path protection demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method, particularly highlighting the reduction in blocking probability enabled by the differentiated degradation policy.