MICRON—A Framework for Connection Establishment in Optical Networks

Traffic grooming in optical networks has gained significance due to the prevailing sub-wavelength requirement of end users. Optical networks get upgraded to the latest technology slowly with time with only a subset of nodes being upgraded to the latest technology. The networks are thus comprised of nodes employing heterogeneous switching architectures. In this paper, we develop a framework called Methodology for Information Collection and Routing in Optical Networks (MICRON) for connection establishment in optical grooming networks with heterogeneous switching architectures. We illustrate with examples the information that may be collected from the links, and operators that may be used to obtain information along a path. The information can be used to select a path dynamically depending on the network status. We complete the MICRON framework by providing a generic channel assignment procedure that could be employed to implement different channel assignment schemes. Various routing and channel assignment algorithms can be developed from the proposed framework. The framework may be easily implemented with simple traffic engineering extensions to the already existing routing protocols in the wide-area networks.