Advance Reservation of Lightpaths in Optical-Network Based Grids

Advance reservation is an important part of grid computing. It guarantees that resources will be available at a pre-determined time to participate in the execution of a grid application. The advance reservation and scheduling of optical networks are key in guaranteeing that enough bandwidth, i.e., lightpaths, will be available for an application during a predetermined interval of time. This paper studies the behavior of two algorithms developed for scheduling multiple lightpaths requested by advance reservation. To assess the benefit of each algorithm, we compare the blocking probability introduced by each of them. The blocking probability is obtained by simulating their behavior on different topologies. This simulation is based on traces of requests generated by FONTS, our Flexible Optical Network Traffic Simulator, which provides on-demand and advance-reservation requests with different characteristics.