Adaptive routing algorithm for lambda switching networks

Current developments in optical components ’ technologies enable wavelengths to be very narrowly spaced, transforming the optical fiber into a multi-terabit capacity medium. A new generation of “all-Optical ” Cross-Connects started to appear in the market leading to a number of advantages such as increased switching capacity, decreased overall network costs, scalability and transparency resulting in the capability to support any protocol. An additional advantage is the ability to configure the switching fabric and the wavelength converters in real time. For the control of Optical Cross-Connects, the MPLambdaS approach was proposed by IETF, according to which the MPLS traffic engineering control plane is used in Optical Cross Connects. New corporate services appear such as storage area networks, optical virtual private networks, while end-user broadband services like video on demand and person-to-person applications pose a huge demand to today’s providers. In this new environment the issue of resource allocation in mesh topology networks using Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) is very important. In this paper an adaptive routing algorithm based on lexicographic optimization is proposed and it is examined through simulation. The experimental results show that the algorithm outperforms in terms of overall network throughput by more than 30 % two well-known algorithms: shortest path and fixed paths least congested routing. For large core networks this improvement corresponds to an increase in the order of Tbps. In this paper an attempt is also made to propose a framework for the application of lexicographic optimization in large operator’