Intelligent mesh based optical network routing and restoration

Summary form only given. Explosive traffic growth, emerging networking technology breakthroughs and fierce market competition lead people to envision a simplified "flatter" network architecture for the future with IP as an universal networking protocol at the service layer and optical networking as the scalable technology at the transport layer. This paper addresses several design issues of such long haul optical transport networks. While the optical core can have ring, mesh or hybrid topology, mesh based architecture for wavelength routing and restoration with built-in intelligence will become increasingly more desirable due to its provisioning flexibility and bandwidth efficiency. In this talk, we first compare the capacity efficiencies between mesh based architectures and ring based architectures. Then we focus on optical cross connect based mesh networks and propose an intelligent and distributed wavelength routing and restoration architecture. We demonstrate a novel link weight formula for network resource optimization which shows promising simulation performance.