Performance of adaptive routing strategies in wavelength-routed networks

As the trend of increased reconfigurability emerges in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks, lightpath establishment would be moved from static toward dynamic regimes. Therefore our interest is in real-time traffic where connection requests arrive dynamically and last for a random holding time if granted. We are concerned with the performance of adaptive routing algorithms in wavelength-routed networks with wavelength conversion capability. We first investigate several adaptive routing strategies, including the shortest path strategy, the least-loaded path strategy, and the proposed weighted-shortest path strategy . We then develop an analytical model to estimate blocking performance and compare the analyses with simulations. The numerical results show that the weighted-shortest path strategy can enhance blocking performance and fairly distribute load among the links.