A Hybrid Control Architecture for Connection Management in Translucent WDM Networks

Translucent WDM networks use a set of sparsely but strategically placed 2R or/and 3R regenerators to overcome physical impairments and wavelength collision introduced by fully transparent networks. In this paper, we concentrate on the study of control architectures and management approaches for connection establishment in translucent networks. A hybrid OCP (optical control plane) has been proposed, which needs the extensions of both routing and signaling protocol. In hybrid OCP, we combine the best features of routing based information updating and signaling based data collection and path evaluation, in order to achieve better performance. Simulations are conducted to compare hybrid OCP with two existing control architectures: signaling based OCP and routing based OCP. Numerical results show that hybrid OCP keeps a lower blocking probability than the other approaches, and also minimize the stability and scalability problems under various traffic conditions.