Reconfiguration of the routing in WDM networks with two classes of services

In WDM backbone networks, the traffic pattern evolves constantly due to the nature of the demand itself or because of equipment failures leading to reroute affected connections. In this context, requests are routed greedily using available resources without changing the routing of pre-established connections. However, such a policy leads to a poor usage of resources and so to a higher blocking probability: new connection requests might be rejected while network resources are sufficient to serve all the traffic. Therefore, it is important to regularly reconfigure the network by rerouting established connections in order to optimize the usage of network resources. In this paper, we consider the network reconfiguration problem that consists in switching existing connections one after the other from the current routing to a new pre-computed routing. Due to cyclic dependencies between connections, some requests may have to be temporarily interrupted during this process. Yet, the number of requests simultaneously interrupted has to be minimized. Furthermore, it might be impossible for the network operator to interrupt some connections because of the contract signed with the corresponding clients. In this setting, the network reconfiguration problem consists in going from a routing to another one given that some priority connections cannot be interrupted. The network reconfiguration problem without priority connections has previously been modeled as a cops-and-robber game. Here, we first extend this model to handle priority connections. Then we identify cases where no solution exists. Using a simple transformation, we prove that the reconfiguration problem with priority connections can be reduced to the problem without this constraint. Finally, we propose a new heuristic algorithm that improves upon previous proposals.