Routing foreseeable lightpath demands using a tabu search meta-heuristic

We investigate the problem of routing a set of lightpath demands for which the start and end dates may be planned. We call this type of requests foreseeable lightpath demands or FLDs. In a transport network, FLDs correspond, for example, to clients' requests for pre-provisioned bandwidth capacity such as fixed-bandwidth pipes for bulk data transfers during the night, extra VPN bandwidth used during peak office working time, etc. Since in some cases the FLDs are not all simultaneous in time, it is possible to reuse physical resources to realize time-disjoint demands. We propose a routing algorithm that takes into account this property to minimize the number of required WDM channels in the physical links of the network. The gain (in term of saved resources) provided by the algorithm, when compared to a shortest path routing strategy, depends both on the spatial and temporal structure of the set of traffic demands and on the structure of the physical network. The routing problem is formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem. A tabu search meta-heuristic algorithm is developed to solve this problem.