Maximum flow based Routing and Wavelength Assignment in all-optical networks

This paper presents a new routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) strategy for WDM optical networks. This new strategy is based on a maximum flow computation and it is particularly useful when we consider optical networks with limited wavelength conversion capability. We use a simple topology transformation combined with a flow-network representation to solve the RWA problem without decoupling routing from wavelength assignment. Results and comparisons show that the max-flow based RWA strategy outperforms, in terms of blocking probability, other state-of-the-art strategies.