Adaptive virtual topology reconfiguration policy employing multi-stage traffic prediction in optical Internet

This paper studies the issues arising in the virtual topology reconfiguration phase of optical Internet networks. This reconfiguration process means to change the virtual topology in response to the changing traffic patterns in the higher layer. We formulate the optimal reconfiguration policy as a multi-stage decision-making problem to maximize the expected reward and cost function over an infinite horizon. To counter the continual approximation problem brought by heuristic approach, we take the traffic prediction into consideration. We propose a new heuristic reconfiguration algorithm called prediction based multi-stage reconfiguration approach to realize the optimal reconfiguration policy. Simulation results show that our reconfiguration policy significantly outperforms the conventional one, while the required physical resources are limited.