A novel reconfiguration distributed protocol for mesh WDM optical networks

One of critical issues of today\´s optical network planning is how to implement a dynamically reconfigurable optical transport layer coupled with suitable control and management protocols. This paper presents a novel distributed connection management protocol with reconfiguration capabilities for data-centric optical networks. A novel concept of a "token-based" distributed algorithm to reroute existing connections to optimal paths after a failure recovery is introduced. The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated and compared via simulation in a distributed control environment.