Solving the routing and wavelength assignment problem in WDM networks for future planning

In this article we define and analyze the routing and wavelength assignment problem by applying a virtual topology for both the optical network and the light paths. We introduce our developed algorithm to solve offline RWA problem. First the light path requests are constrained to repeated uniform distributed traffic. The reason is that this constraint permits us to study and analyze the behavior of the RWA problem. In addition, this constraint could be used as a benchmark to compare different algorithms. Then we relax the requests constraint to be non-uniform traffic. We show that the maximum number of assigned wavelengths depends on the number of traversed links, not on the shortest path length. Theorems are derived with proof to justify our algorithm. The effect of adding supplementary links to the WDM optical network is also explained to show how this approach could be used in the future planning for online operation. Finally, the result shows significant different in the number of wavelengths used compared to a recent backbone implemented network.