Deadline-Driven Bandwidth Allocation with Flexible Transmission Rates in WDM Networks

We investigate dynamic bandwidth allocation with flexible transmission rates for deadline-driven requests (DDRs) in wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) mesh networks. DDRs provide more scheduling flexibility to the network operator compared with typical requests with no deadline and requiring a fixed bandwidth. By choosing the bandwidth and adapting the transmission rate depending on network state, the network´s performance can be improved. We investigate several bandwidth allocation policies and study their benefits on network performance. Our investigation shows that an adaptive policy generally performs the best. Further improvement can be achieved by using dynamic readjustment of the allocated bandwidth.