A scheduling application for WDM optical networks

Optical networking using WDM technology has matured considerably, and commercial WDM network equipment and WDM network control and management prototypes have appeared. To use such a network efficiently, a scheduling facility and its enabling mechanisms have to be provided. This scheduling facility should be integrated to interoperate with the rest of the network control and management software such as connection manager or signaling daemon. We present a scheduling application to address this need. The architecture for the application and its key components are presented. Agent-related enabling mechanisms are introduced to monitor the optical signal quality and collect performance measurements. A resource broker is used to manage the communication and interoperability between agents and the application. An event service is developed to decouple the communication between the agents and the scheduling application, and to enable the communication among the agents themselves. The scheduling application consists of the quality of signal information and threshold objects, current network usage, history data module, scheduling module, and access to a performance database. To provide traffic control and high network resource utilization, the application is equipped with wavelength scheduling algorithms. An experimental study for the basic scheduling algorithms has been conducted over the MONET DC network.