| The demand for more bandwidth is steadily increasing despite the hard times facing telecommunication equipment manufacturers and carriers. This demand motivated the industrial and research communities alike to believe that removing the electronic components from optical transport networks and using the Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology are key to upgrade the capacity of these networks. This led these communities to embark on the task to develop high capacity, modular, scalable, and flexible all-optical DWDM transport networks with rich monitoring and management capabilities. However, these new networks require new protocols and mechanisms to control and manage their resources.; While all-optical DWDM transport networks offer capacities above those offered by traditional electro-optical networks, several challenges are introduced beyond those known in traditional electro-optical networks. In this research, we consider the routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) problem and provide a generic framework to handle this problem in networks that support different degrees of wavelength conversion capabilities.; First, we provide an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation for the routing and wavelength assignment problem faced in DWDM networks with sparse wavelength conversion capabilities. This formulation solves the static-lightpath establishment problem for small networks. For large networks, we present a pruning strategy that helps to reduce the number of variables and constraints involved in the ILP formulation.; Second, we present an extension to the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing protocol that enables it to handle routing in all-optical DWDM networks regardless of their wavelength conversion capabilities.; Third, we propose two different origination policies, one that is simple and the other is very efficient in handling the dynamic nature of resource availabilities in all-optical DWDM networks with different degrees of wavelength conversion.; Finally, we propose a routing and wavelength assignment strategy that is based on fuzzy-logic for route selection and the most-contiguous wavelength assignment heuristic for wavelength assignment. The proposed routing and wavelength assignment strategy can be used to implement a route computation engine that efficiently routes lightpaths in optical networks with different degrees of wavelength conversion capabilities. Simulation results are presented to compare our proposed heuristics with other approaches presented in the literature. |
