Wavelength Conversion

Genetic Algorithms (GA) provide an attractive approach to solving the challenging problem of dynamic routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) in optical Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks, because they usually achieve a significantly low blocking probability. Available GA-based dynamic RWA algorithms were designed mainly for WDM networks with a wavelength continuity constraint, and they cannot be applied directly to WDM networks with wavelength conversion capability. Furthermore, the available GA-based dynamic RWA algorithms suffer from the problem of requiring a very time consuming process to generate the first population of routes for a request, which may results in a significantly large delay in path setup. In this paper, we study the dynamic RWA problem in WDM networks with sparse wavelength conversion and propose a novel hybrid algorithm for it based on th