Artificial Bee Colony model for routing and wavelength assignment problem

In this paper a novel approach for modelling Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) problem in wavelength-routed Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) optical networks is proposed. A new idea based on Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is introduced for solving RWA problem which is known to be an NP-hard problem. In the proposed ABC-RWA approach every food source represents a possible and feasible lightpath between each original and destination node pair in demand matrix. The positions of food sources are modified by some artificial bees in the population where the aim is to discover the places of food sources. The food source with the highest nectar value seems to be a solution which is evaluated by the fitness function. The simulation results demonstrate the ability and efficiency of proposed approach for solving RWA in real-world optical networks. The proposed approach could be extended for dynamic RWA schemes in real-time applications and employed by network resilience architectures.