Wavelength routing with spare reconfiguration for all-optical WDM networks

This study presents a wavelength-routing scheme with spare reconfiguration (SR) to construct dependable all-optical wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) networks. Path protection using shared spare lightpaths is a general wavelength-routing method for reducing blocking probability while minimizing demand for spare resources. However, in a dynamic traffic environment, this method may still yield a poor performance because a wavelength on a link is very likely to be continuously held by a spare lightpath and to be unable to be assigned to the working lightpath of a new connection. This study develops a spare reconfiguration mechanism with wavelength reassignment (SR_WR) and path reassignment (SR_PR) to make the spare dynamic and thus further reduce the blocking probability. The proposed wavelength routing with SR proceeds in three stages and has polynomial time complexity. Extensive simulation experiments were conducted on the NSFNET and the K5 fully connected network to investigate the performance of the proposed wavelength routing with SR. Results of this study show that the proposed wavelength routing with SR can reduce the blocking probability compared with the general wavelength routing with just shared spare lightpaths by choosing a positive tuning cost. In addition, the improvement of the blocking performance is maximized when using SR_WR followed by SR_PR.