DYNAMIC ROUTING ALGORITHMS IN TRANSPARENT OPTICAL NETWORKS -- An Experimental Study Based on Real Data

Today’s telecommunication networks are configured statically. Whenever a connection is established, the customer has permanent access to it. However, it is observed that usually the connection is not used continuously. At this point, dynamic provisioning could increase the utilization of network resources. WDM based Optical Transport Networks (OTNs) will shortly allow for fast dynamic network reconfiguration. This enables optical broadband leased line services on demand. Since service requests competing for network resources may lead to service blocking, it is vital to use appropriate strategies for routing and wavelength assignment in transparent optical networks. We simulate the service blocking probabilities of various dynamic algorithms for this problem using a well-founded traffic model for two realistic networks. One of the algorithms using shortest path routings performs best on all instances. Surprisingly, the tie-breaking rule between equally short paths in different wavelengths decides between success or failure