Dynamic anycasting over wavelength routed networks with lightpath switching

In this paper we investigate the problem of provisioning dynamic anycast holding-time-aware (HTA) lightpaths in all-optical wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) networks. We employ a technique called lightpath switching (LPS) wherein the data transmission may begin on one lightpath and switch to a different lightpath at a later time. We propose two heuristics to solve the anycast routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) problem: anycast with continuous segment (ACS) and anycast with lightpath switching (ALPS). We first compare the performance of ACS to ALPS and observe that ALPS achieves better blocking than ACS. Furthermore, we also compare the performance of these two anycast RWA algorithms to the traditional unicast RWA algorithm. We show that the anycast RWA algorithms presented here significantly out-perform the traditional unicast RWA algorithms.