Adaptive wavelength routing in all-optical networks

We consider routing and wavelength assignment in wavelength-routed all-optical networks (WAN) with circuit switching. The conventional approaches to address this issue consider the two aspects of the problem disjointly by first finding a route from a predetermined set of candidate paths and then searching for an appropriate wavelength assignment. We adopt a more general approach in which we consider all paths between a source-destination (s-d) pair and incorporate network state information into the routing decision. This approach performs routing and wavelength assignment jointly and adaptively, and outperforms fixed routing techniques. We present adaptive routing and wavelength assignment algorithms and evaluate their blocking performance. We obtain an analytical technique to compute approximate blocking probabilities for networks employing fixed and alternate routing. The analysis can also accommodate networks with multiple fibers per link. The blocking performance of the proposed adaptive routing algorithms are compared along with their computational complexity.