Power-Aware Connection Provisioning for All-Optical Multicast Traffic in WDM Networks

The connection provisioning problem attempts to achieve its objective of guaranteeing the maximum throughput and minimal blocking probability. In optical networks, this problem is mainly the classical routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) problem, which includes many constraints. In this study, we investigate the RWA problem for connection provisioning under multicast traffic while considering the optical power constraints. The problem is first formulated as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) with the objective of minimizing the session blocking rate. In order to provide fast and efficient solutions, the paper introduces a novel heuristic solution that divides the problem into subproblems and solves them separately, while still taking the interdependency between them into account. The results obtained from both solutions are found to be closely comparable. The results obtained from the heuristic also provide insight for the network operators about the maximum performance enhancement that can be achieved by upgrading the network capacity.