| The convergence of optical networking and the Internet has brought us many interesting research problems. Optical switching and mesh optical resilience are the two important ones that this thesis focuses on. Optical switching or wavelength routing has the benefit of optical bypass that significantly reduces the cost of transporting high-speed traffic, but it has the shortcomings of coarse granularity and lack of multiplexing gain, which make it inefficient to transport Internet traffic. On the other hand, electrical switching or sub-wavelength routing, while involving expensive high-speed electronic processing, offers diverse switching granularity and multiplexing gain. We proposed a hybrid wavelength and sub-wavelength routing scheme that optimally balances the benefits of optical and electrical switching. To optimize the configuration of the hybrid routing scheme, we introduced an integer linear programming formulation under static traffic condition. To evaluate the performance of the hybrid routing scheme under dynamic traffic condition, we developed a framework to calculate average transport cost and derived some simple analytical expressions under random uniform traffic assumption.; A distinct feature of optical networks is its resilience requirement. A large percentage of future optical networks are envisioned to be mesh networks, which support Internet traffic more efficiently than traditional ring networks. However, resilience of mesh optical networks is significantly more complex than that of ring networks. A myriad of requirements have to be satisfied, such as efficiency, fast recovery, simplicity, robustness, scalability, and transparency to IP-oriented routing protocols. We proposed a series of Hamiltonian cycle based resilience schemes that strike a sensible balance among the many requirements. We differentiated resilience strategies between moderate and large scale networks, since they have very different characteristics and warrant varied resilience solutions. For large-scale networks, we proposed a multi-domain protection strategy that limits failure influence to the local scope and is capable of dealing with multiple simultaneous failures. |
