Dynamic lightpath provisioning in optical WDM mesh networks with asymmetric nodes

Abstract

The wavelength selective switch-based reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers is a promising switching equipment for future reconfigurable wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) mesh networks. However, its asymmetric switching property complicates the optimal routing and wavelength assignment problem. In an asymmetric switching scenario, using the classic Dijkstra's algorithm can lead to invalid paths traversing unconnected ports of an asymmetric node. To solve this problem, we propose both link-state (LS) and distance vector (DV) schemes for dynamic lightpath provisioning in optical WDM mesh networks with asymmetric nodes. The proposed LS schemes include the asymmetric switching-aware (ASA) Dijkstra's algorithm, the $$K$$ -shortest path-based algorithm, and the entire path searching (EPS) algorithm. Simulation results show that the ASA-Dijkstra's algorithm will bring notable improvement of the blocking performance with low computational complexity, while the EPS algorithm has much higher complexity and is not suitable to be employed in large-scale networks. On the other hand, our proposed DV solution, i.e., the information diffusion-based routing (IDBR), can achieve the lowest blocking probability with the lowest computational complexity. Moreover, IDBR does not require the distribution of local asymmetric switching information like the LS schemes, thus having a high level of topology confidentiality.