An Optical-Drop Wavelength Assignment Algorithm for Efficient Wavelength Reuse under Heterogeneous Traffic in WDM Ring Networks

Abstract

The wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technology has been popular in communication societies for providing very large communication bands by multiple lightpaths with different wavelengths on a single optical fiber. Particularly, a double-ring optical network architecture based on the packet-over-WDM technology such as the HORNET architecture, has been extensively studied as a next generation platform for metropolitan area networks (MANs). Each node in this architecture is equipped with a wavelength-fixed optical-drop and a fast tunable transmitter so that a lightpath can be established between any pair of nodes without wavelength conversions. In this paper, we formulate the optical-drop wavelength assignment problem (ODWAP) for efficient wavelength reuse under heterogeneous traffic in this network, and prove the NP-completeness of its decision problem. Then, we propose a simple heuristic algorithm for the basic case of ODWAP. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate the effiectiveness of our approach in reducing waiting times for packet transmissions when a small number of wavelengths are available to retain the network cost for MANs.