A novel connection setup management approach for optical wdm networks

Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) has significantly increased the transmission capacity of today's optical networks. An increase in the available bandwidth is promoting at the same time the introduction of new services, each having different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. In this regard, QoS parameters applicable to connection setup, namely connection blocking probability and connection setup time, are expected to greatly influence the procedure of lightpath setup. In view of this, we propose to consider the connection setup time requirement as a (timely increasing) priority indicator during optical connection provisioning. In other words, we envisage in this letter the assignment of the highest setup priority to those optical connection requests having the shortest setup time requirements. To achieve this purpose, we adapt the well known Earliest Deadline First (EDF) scheduling discipline to the particular case of optical connection setup management. In order to gauge the impact of our proposal on the QoS perceived by optical clients, we introduce in this letter a computational method. This latter is used for the assessment of the percentage of optical connections that are successfully established under the proposed setup management approach.