A Comparative Study of Node Architectures with Add/Drop Constraints in WDM Networks

The advent of WDM technology has resulted in transmission capacities that have increased manifold in recent years. The most common architecture used for establishing communication in WDM optical networks is wavelength routing, where data are transmitted over all-optical WDM channels, called lightpaths, which may span multiple consecutive fibers. A lightpath is realized by determining a path between the source and the destination and allocating a free wavelength on all the links of the path. The selection of the path and the wavelength to be used by a lightpath is an important optimization problem, known as the routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) problem (Ramaswami & Sivarajan, 1995). In the absence of wavelength conversion, a lightpath must be assigned a common wavelength on each link it traverses; this restriction is referred to as the wavelength continuity constraint. However, two lightpaths may occupy the same wavelength, as long as they use disjoint sets of links; this property is known as wavelength reuse. The RWA problem is usually considered under two alternative traffic models. Static Lightpath Establishment (SLE) addresses the case where the set of connections is known in advance and Dynamic Lightpath Establishment (DLE) considers the case where connection requests arrive randomly, over an infinite time horizon, and are served one-by-one.