Ant-based survivable routing in dynamic WDM networks with shared backup paths

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of survivable routing in dynamic WDM networks with single link failure model. Our work mainly concerns in how to dynamically determine a protection cycle (i.e., two link-disjoint paths between a node pair) to establish a dependable lightpath with backup paths sharing. This problem is identified as NP-complete, thus a heuristic for finding near optimal solution with reasonable computation time is usually preferred. Inspired from the principle of ant colony optimization, we propose in this paper an ant-based mobile agents algorithm for this problem with improved blocking performance. To enable the new ant-based algorithm, we propose to use on each network node both a routing table that contains a set of feasible protection cycles between source destination nodes and also a pheromone table for mobile agents. By keeping a suitable number of mobile agents in a network to continually and proactively update the routing tables based on the current network congestion state, the routing solution of a connection request can be obtained with a reasonable computation time. Extensive simulation results upon the ns-2 network simulator and two typical network topologies show that our new algorithm can achieve a significantly lower blocking probability than the promising algorithm for dynamic lightpath protection proposed in [11] with a comparable computation complexity.