Heuristics for Planning GMPLS Networks with Conversion and Regeneration Capabilities

With the explosive traffic growth of WDM-based transport networks, the development of GMPLS (or multi- granularity)-based transport networks becomes essential to cope with the network scalability problems. This paper defines a novel problem of planning realistic GMPLS-based transport networks by (1) considering the whole traffic hierarchy defined in GMPLS; (2) allowing optical signal conversion at all granularity levels; (3) imposing optical reach constraint on the length of all- optical paths. We will call such a problem the routing and multi- granular paths assignment (RMGPA). The objective of the problem is to minimize the weighted port count in the transport network. Due to the computational complexity of the problem, only very-small-sized problems can be solved exactly through mixed integer linear programming (MILP) optimization. In this work, we propose novel heuristics that are capable of solving large-sized problems in a reasonable amount of time.