Review and Performance Analysis on Routing and Wavelength Assignment Approaches for Optical Networks

Abstract

For the past several years, traffic especially, Internet traffic has been increased tremendously and this growth demands for a high-speed communication network such as optical network. Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) is one of the key tasks for the optical network, due to its information transparency and wavelength reuse characteristics. In this paper, we discuss different conventional RWA approaches in the wavelength-routed optical networks and compare them with our proposed Priority-based RWA (PRWA) scheme under wavelength continuity constraint. The performance analysis of different conventional RWA approaches including our PRWA scheme is conducted in terms of blocking probability. Finally, we address a number of research issues that appear to us to be both important and challenging.