A heuristic for placement of limited range wavelength converters in all-optical networks

Wavelength routed optical networks have emerged as a technology that can effectively utilize the enormous bandwidth of the optical fiber. Wavelength converters play an important role in enhancing the fiber utilization and reducing the overall call blocking probability of the network. As the distortion of the optical signal increases with the increase in the range of wavelength conversion in optical wavelength converters, limited range wavelength conversion assumes importance. Placement of wavelength converters is a NP complete problem [K.C. Lee, V.O.K. Li, IEEE J. Lightwave Technol. 11 (1993) 962-970] in an arbitrary mesh network. In this paper, we investigate heuristics for placing limited range wavelength converters in arbitrary mesh wavelength routed optical networks. The objective is to achieve near optimal placement of limited range wavelength converters resulting in reduced blocking probabilities and low distortion of the optical signal. The proposed heuristic is to place limited range wavelength converters at the most congested nodes, nodes which lie on the long lightpaths and nodes where conversion of optical signals is significantly high. We observe that limited range converters at few nodes can provide almost the entire improvement in the blocking probability as the full range wavelength converters placed at all the nodes. Congestion control in the network is brought about by dynamically adjusting the weights of the channels in the link thereby balancing the load and reducing the average delay of the traffic in the entire network. Simulations have been carried out on a 12-node ring network, 14-node NSFNET, 19-node European Optical Network (EON), 28-node US long haul network, hypothetical 30-node INET network and the results agree with the analysis. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V, All rights reserved

Resource Allocation Schemes And Performance Evaluation Models For Wavelength Division Multiplexed Optical Networks

Wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) optical networks are rapidly becoming the technology of choice in network infrastructure and next-generation Internet architectures. WDM networks have the potential to provide unprecedented bandwidth, reduce processing cost, achieve protocol transparency, and enable efficient failure handling. This dissertation addresses the important issues of improving the performance and enhancing the reliability of WDM networks as well as modeling and evaluating the performance of these networks. Optical wavelength conversion is one of the emerging WDM enabling technologies that can significantly improve bandwidth utilization in optical networks. A new approach for the sparse placement of full wavelength converters based on the concept of the k-Dominating Set (k-DS) of a graph is presented. The k-DS approach is also extended to the case of limited conversion capability using three scalable and cost-effective switch designs: flexible node-sharing, strict node-sharing and static mapping. Compared to full search algorithms previously proposed in the literature, the K-DS approach has better blocking performance, has better time complexity and avoids the local minimum problem. The performance benefit of the K-DS approach is demonstrated by extensive simulation. Fiber delay line (FDL) is another emerging WDM technology that can be used to obtain limited optical buffering capability. A placement algorithm, k-WDS, for the sparse placement of FDLs at a set of selected nodes in Optical Burst Switching (OBS) networks is proposed. The algorithm can handle both uniform and non-uniform traffic patterns. Extensive performance tests have shown that k-WDS provides more efficient placement of optical fiber delay lines than the well-known approach of placing the resources at nodes with the highest experienced burst loss. Performance results that compare the benefit of using FDLs versus using optical wavelength converters (OWCs) are presented. A new algorithm, A-WDS, for the placement of an arbitrary numbers of FDLs and OWCs is introduced and is evaluated under different non-uniform traffic loads. This dissertation also introduces a new cost-effective optical switch design using FDL and a QoS-enhanced JET (just enough time) protocol suitable for optical burst switched WDM networks. The enhanced JET protocol allows classes of traffic to benefit from FDLs and OWCs while minimizing the end-to-end delay for high priority bursts. Performance evaluation models of WDM networks represent an important research area that has received increased attention. A new analytical model that captures link dependencies in all-optical WDM networks under uniform traffic is presented. The model enables the estimation of connection blocking probabilities more accurately than previously possible. The basic formula of the dependency between two links in this model reflects their degree of adjacency, the degree of connectivity of the nodes composing them and their carried traffic. The usefulness of the model is illustrated by applying it to the sparse wavelength converters placement problem in WDM networks. A lightpath containing converters is divided into smaller sub-paths such that each sub-path is a wavelength continuous path and the nodes shared between these sub-paths are full wavelength conversion capable. The blocking probability of the entire path is obtained by computing the blocking probabilities of the individual sub-paths. The analytical-based sparse placement algorithm is validated by comparing it with its simulation-based counterpart using a number of network topologies. Rapid recovery from failure and high levels of reliability are extremely important in WDM networks. A new Fault Tolerant Path Protection scheme, FTPP, for WDM mesh networks based on the alarming state of network nodes and links is introduced. The results of extensive simulation tests show that FTPP outperforms known path protection schemes in terms of loss of service ratio and network throughput. The simulation tests used a wide range of values for the load intensity, the failure arrival rate and the failure holding time. The FTPP scheme is next extended to the differentiated services model and its connection blocking performance is evaluated. Finally, a QoS-enhanced FTPP (QEFTPP) routing and path protection scheme in WDM networks is presented. QEFTPP uses preemption to minimize the connection blocking percentage for high priority traffic. Extensive simulation results have shown that QEFTPP achieves a clear QoS differentiation among the traffic classes and provides a good overall network performance

Wavelength assignment in all-optical networks for mesh topologies

All-Optical Networks employing Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) are believed to be the next generation networks that can meet the ever-increasing demand for bandwidth of the end users. This thesis presents some new heuristics for wavelength assignment and converter placement in mesh topologies. Our heuristics try to assign the wavelengths in an efficient manner that results in very low blocking probability. We propose novel static and dynamic assignment schemes that outperform the assignments reported in the literature even when converters are used. The proposed on-line scheme called Round-Robin assignment outperforms previously proposed strategies such as first-fit and random assignment schemes. The performance improvement obtained with the proposed static assignments is very significant when compared with the dynamic schemes. We designed and developed a simulator in the C language that supports the 2D mesh topology with DWDM. We ran extensive simulations and compared our heuristics with those reported in the literature. We have examined converter placement in mesh topologies and proposed that placing converters at the center yields better results than uniform placement when dimension order routing is employed. We introduced a new concept called wavelength assignment with second trial that results in extremely low blocking probabilities when compared to schemes based on a single trial. Our proposed schemes are simple to implement and do not add to the cost. Thus we conclude that wavelength assignment plays more significant role in affecting the blocking probability than wavelength converters. We further conclude that static schemes without converters could easily outperform dynamic schemes thus resulting in great savings

Design of survivable WDM network based on pre-configured protection cycle

Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) is an important technique which allows the trans- port of large quantities of data over optical networks. All optical WDM-based networks have been used to improve overall communication capacity and provide an excellent choice for the design of backbone networks. However, due to the high traffic load that each link can carry in a WDM network, survivability against failures becomes very important. Survivability in this context is the ability of the network to maintain continuity of service against failures, since a failure can lead to huge data losses. In recent years, many survivability mechanisms have been studied and their performance assessed through capacity efficiency, restoration time and restorability. Survivability mechanisms for ring and mesh topologies have received particular attention