| In this thesis, we present our recent research work in the area of optical Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks, an important area which promises to be the focus of ongoing and future research. A WDM network consists of optical wavelength routing nodes interconnected by point-to-point fiber links in an arbitrary topology. WDM allows simultaneous transmission of multiple wavelengths within a single fiber. Although each wavelength can have a transmission capacity up to ten gigabit per second, some traffic streams may require lower bandwidth. To utilize the wavelengths more efficiently, traffic grooming is deployed to share the capacity of a wavelength among users with different bandwidth granularities. In WDM networks, the Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) problem is an important issue.; Service Differentiation, Quality of Service (QoS), and Fairness Management are still open research problems in WDM grooming/non-grooming networks. The main contribution of this work is to formulate these problems for both grooming and non-grooming networks in the framework of the Markov Decision Process theory to determine the optimal dynamic wavelength allocation policies. Due to the huge size of the state space for realistic networks, the optimal policy determination is not possible in practice. Hence, heuristic algorithms are proposed with close performance to the optimal solution and lower computational complexity than the optimal. Another contribution of this proposal is to estimate the blocking performance of the system in order to dimension the network links. This work is a fundamental research study on resource management and has great value in future QoS-aware WDM networks. |
