Least resource consumption routing for survivable optical networks

In this paper, we consider the problem of determining primary and backup paths for survivable optical WDM mesh networks. We propose a distributed routing mechanism, called least resource consumption routing (LRCR), that tries to minimize the combined cost of the primary and the backup path. The proposed cost model includes the effect of various factors such as mean load, variance of the load on the route, number of converters required by the route and the length of the route. Further, we model the route cost in such a way that it is extensible to include any new parameters and vary their relative importance. The performance results for the NSFNET topology and a 30-node random network, show that the proposed scheme leads to at least 30% improvement in terms of blocking probability and reduces the amount of converters required per node by about 80% compared to other proposed techniques in literature.