Delayed Wavelength Switching and Allocation in Optical Networks

Advanced network engineering is rapidly evolving and providing ever larger levels of communications capacity. This work explores deployed wavelength division modulation (WDM) optical networks and the flexible lightpath scheduling problems. Lightpath switching can improve the performance of routing and wavelength allocation (RWA) in WDM by relaxing the continuity constraint and consequently reducing connection request blocking probability during RWA process. Through extensive simulations, we are able to conclude that our proposed delayed allocation (DA) algorithm with wavelength switching improves resource consumption efficiency and lowers call blocking. We also evaluate demands with limited wavelength switching such that a reasonable result can be specified. This wavelength switching is found to signiflcantly increase the performance improvement of DA.