Wavelength Assignment Technique Research Articles

Design methodology for WDM backbone networks using FWM-aware heuristic algorithm

The problem of lightpath topology design (LTD) and traffic routing over the lightpaths for wavelength-routed optical backbone networks has been investigated extensively in the past using heuristic as well as linear-programming based approaches. Sensitivity of such long-haul backbones to physical-layer impairments is required to be adequately addressed during LTD phase to improve overall performance. For optical communication using wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) over a long-haul fiber backbone, four-wave mixing (FWM) may become one of the significant transmission impairments. Intrinsically, for a WDM-based wavelength-routed network with wavelengths assigned using equally-spaced channels, the generated FWM components are found to remain more crowded at the center of the fiber transmission window. Using this observation, we propose an LTD scheme employing a unique wavelength assignment (WA) technique, wherein long lightpaths (traversing through a larger number of fiber links) are allocated wavelengths at the either edges of the fiber transmission window whereas short lightpaths (consisting of fewer fiber links) are placed in the middle of the transmission window, thereby reducing the FWM crosstalk for long lightpaths. Since long lightpaths comprise of large numbers of fiber links and intermediate nodes, they experience large amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise and switch crosstalk. Therefore, by using the proposed WA technique, long lightpaths while suffering from more ASE noise and switch crosstalk get subjected to lesser FWM crosstalk leading to a more uniform distribution of overall optical signal-to-noise ratio for all the lightpaths across the network. Analysis of our results indicates that the proposed FWM-aware LTD scheme with the novel WA technique can achieve similar congestion levels (of lightpaths) and bandwidth utilization efficiency without any need of additional network resources as compared with the existing FWM-unaware LTD schemes.