Simulated annealing and stochastic ruler algorithms for wavelength assignment planning in WDM optical networks

We study two heuristic optimization techniques for wavelength assignment in WDM multihop optical networks. The selection of the route with minimum delay has been stated as a discrete optimization problem by several authors in the literature, and the stochastic ruler (SR) algorithm has been proposed as a good heuristic techniques to achieve such an optimization goal. However, most of the studies have been focused on a small number of nodes, namely 8 and 16, while the simulated annealing (SA) algorithm has barely been considered for these applications. In this study, we compare the performance of both algorithms under similar experimental settings. According to our results, the SA algorithm has a better performance than the SR in most of the cases, specially when the number of nodes is large