Analysis of Routing and Wavelength Assignment in Large WDM Networks

In Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) network, for a given connection request, a route has to be found, and a dedicated wavelength has to be assigned along that route. This problem of assigning route and wavelength to the connection request, using minimum network resources, is called Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) Problem. This paper focuses on the analysis of proposed RWA algorithms in large WDM networks. We use simulations and analysis of randomly generated large networks under dynamic traffic and static traffic, with and without protection of the connection request. The protection of the primary route between source and destination is considered by setting up a dedicated backup path in case of failures. The wavelength requirements are analyzed using different wavelength assignment heuristics under different routing techniques for a set of connection requests. We find that, the fixed alternate routing packs connection requests into less number of wavelengths than the fixed routing and that most-used wavelength assignment heuristic performs slightly better than the first-fit wavelength assignment heuristic