Optical networks with hybrid routing

All-optical switching or wavelength routing has the benefit of optical bypass that can eliminate expensive high-speed electronic processing at intermediate nodes and reduce significantly the cost of high-bandwidth transport. But all-optical switching has the limitations of coarse granularity, lack of multiplexing gain, and scarcity of wavelength resources, which do not mesh well with Internet traffic that has many small and diverse flows and emphasizes the importance of resource sharing. In particular, wavelength routed light paths have difficulty to seamlessly converge with multiprotocol label switching label-switched paths that have arbitrary bandwidth granularity and relatively abundant labels. In this paper, we propose a hybrid wavelength and subwavelength routing scheme that can preserve the benefits of optical bypass for large traffic flows at the same time provide multiplexing gain for small traffic flows. We first study the hybrid routing scheme using static optimization that produces an optimal path set and a partition between wavelength and subwavelength routing. We then present a dynamic heuristic that tracks the static optimization closely. During the process, we proposed a traffic arrival process called incremental arrival with sporadic random termination to more accurately model practical optical network traffic generation process.