Scheduling advance reservation requests for wavelength division multiplexed networks with static traffic demands

Telecommunication and grid computing applications demand high bandwidth data channels that offer guarantees with respect to service availability. Such applications include: remote surgery, remote experimentation, video on-demand, teleconferencing and bulk transfers. Furthermore, by forecasting traffic patterns Internet service providers attempt to optimise network resources in order to lower operational costs during peak periods of bandwidth consumption. Advance reservation for wavelength division multiplexed networks can address some of these issues by reserving high volume communication channels (i.e. lightpaths) beforehand. The authors develop a mathematical model to solve the problem of scheduling lightpaths in advance. The optimal solution is presented as a mixed integer linear program with the assumption that all traffic is static and the network is centrally controlled. Furthermore, we have developed two novel meta-heuristics based on: 1) a greedy implementation (local search) and 2) simulated annealing. The meta-heuristics have shown to produce good approximate solutions in a reasonable amount of time.