Dynamic Wavelength Allocation in IP/WDM Metro Access Networks

Increasing demand for bandwidth and proliferation of packet based traffic represent a challenge for today's metro networks, which have been traditionally designed to carry circuit- switched connections. The problem is further complicated by the constraints of cost efficiency and traffic adaptability, imposed by the limited customer base in the metro area. Recently, several architectures have been proposed for future metro access networks. Nearly all of these solutions support dynamic reconfigurability, however reconfiguration policies have not been fully explored yet. In this paper, reconfiguration policies for IP/WDM metro access networks with switching delays are considered, where dynamic reconfiguration corresponds to dynamic allocation of wavelengths to access nodes. Exact formulation of the dynamic wavelength allocation (DWA) problem is developed as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and a new cost function is proposed to attain both throughput efficiency and fairness. For larger problems, a heuristic approach based on first passage probabilities is developed and shown to yield nearly optimum performance through simulations.