Abstract
Over the last few years Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) has emerged as one of the major transport technologies for the Internet infrastructure. It has also been seen that the Internet traffic has been growing at an exponential rate. In a DWDM network, an Optical cross-connects (OXCs) inter-connects two fibers. At an OXC, wavelengths can be added or dropped through the add/drop part of the OXC. In a DWDM network data is carried over a lightpath. A lightpath is a set of contiguous links that provide an end-to-end connection using a same (or different) wavelength(s). Wavelength conversion technology in optical domain is still in its infancy and is not commercially available yet. Currently, wavelength conversion is done electronically which is not very efficient in terms of processing speed. Therefore, wavelength conversion is generally avoided in optical networks or is used in a very limited way. Hence, in optical networks with no wavelength conversion, a lightpath is established using a single wavelength only to meet the Wavelength Continuity Constraint (WCC). Establishing a lightpath in a DWDM network involves two steps: computing a route and assigning a wavelength to the computed route, generally referred to as the Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) Problem collectively. In the routing process, a shortest path is computed from the source to destination using some metric such as minimum hop count, link congestion etc). For wavelength assignment, a wavelength is searched that is available on each link of the computed route. The goal of the RWA is to maximize the number of connections. The RWA has been extensively studied in [1-3].
© 2005 Optical Society of America
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