| The revolution of Internet and its popularity among millions of users has resulted in significant increase in the data traffic carried by today's telecommunications networks. The evolution of optical networks, along with its ingenious technologies like Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM), has played a critical role in coping with that huge data traffic. However, the unusual growth in the number of users has been paralleled by a similar growth in the size of the networks. The latter has complicated the task of network management and mandated the need to segregate huge networks into several administrative units, each controlled by a unique organization, known as Autonomous Systems (ASes). For routers in different ASes to communicate with each other, reachability information should be available at each router for it to know the optimal path to reach its targeted router. The latter task is handled in IP-based electronic networks by the de facto inter-domain routing protocol known as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). In order to achieve efficient inter-domain routing in optical networks, we better benefit from the experience gained from the extensive deployment of BGP in electronic IP-based networks. In this thesis, we study the problem of achieving inter-domain routing in optical networks using BGP. We incorporate some modifications in standard BGP and introduce a new version of it, called the eXtended BGP for Optical Networks (xBON), which can be deployed in optical networks. We build a model for xBON and simulate it using OPNET Modeler platform. Finally, simulation results are presented and analyzed. |
