Performance Study of Control and Management Protocols for Dynamic Lightpath Provisioning

This paper presents the performance study of three control and management protocols for dynamic lightpath provisioning for future IP-over-WDM networks. The protocols include the local information-based fixed alternate link routing approach, the distributed global information-based link state approach and the centralized global information-based link state approach. The signaling and the RWA protocol mechanisms are described in details and simulations are made to compare their performance. The performance metrics used include the blocking probability, the connection setup time and the control message overhead. The results show that the centralized global information-based link state approach gives the best compromise of the three protocols.