Requests provisioning algorithms for Dynamic Optical Circuit Switched (DOCS) networks: A survey

To meet the demands of ever increasing bandwidth hungry applications architectures like circuit switching, packet switching and burst switching have been proposed in the literature. Dynamic Optical Circuit Switching (DOCS) is the optical counter part of the circuit switching; it can provide huge bandwidth to the end users by establishing high capacity light-paths. For provisioning requests in DOCS networks many heuristics have been proposed in literature. In this paper we summarize few of these algorithms with main focus on algorithms that make use of parameters like connection holding time or timing deadlines for routing and wavelength assignment purposes. We observe that sometimes certain parameters of a request like connection duration can be used to improve optical networks performance significantly. We have also summarized a traffic grooming approach named as S/G light tree architecture; the main feature of this architecture is its property to groom traffic without requiring optical to electrical to optical (OEO) conversion at intermediate nodes.