Initial Survey of Heuristics for Optical Core Network Design in ACTS WOTAN

this paper is to describe the involvement of the University of Essex in the Network Design and Management Strategies workpackage of the Advanced Communications Technologies and Services (ACTS) Wavelength-agile Optical Transport and Access Network (WOTAN) project. The paper is organised as follows: section 2 introduces the WOTAN project; section 3 details the core network design problem and some of the research Essex plans to carry out in this area; section 4 describes the genetic-algorithm/heuristic approach we intend to use; section 5 and 6 survey some of the existing literature on genetic-algorithm-based and heuristic-based network design and section 7 concludes the paper

Heuristic Topological Design of Low-Cost Optical Telecommunication Networks

this paper was undertaken as part of the Network Design and Management Strategies workpackage of the Advanced Communications Technologies and Services (ACTS) Wavelength-agile Optical Transport and Access Network (WOTAN) project. The aims of this paper are to describe five simple heuristics for low-cost virtual-topology design of flat (i.e. non-hierarchical) optical telecommunication networks, and then to assess their performance by applying them to ten test networks in a variety of sequences. (Virtual-topology design ignores the underlying physical reality of which ducts and fibres will actually be used.) The rules were chosen because of their inherent simplicity in deciding which node pairs to directly connect in a network, their potential for inclusion in subsequent genetic-algorithm/heuristic hybrid algorithms, and because it was hoped that they would form a useful foundation for more advanced traffic-sensitive design heuristics. Possible avenues for enhancing the original heuristics are also discussed. WOTAN is a European Commission funded ACTS project [1] that addresses the structures, systems, technologies, management and economics of both wavelength-agile and wavelength-routed optical systems, and is intended to provide end-to-end customer connections across a complete public telecommunications network. The key to the project is the use of wavelengthagile techniques in Wavelength-Division-Multiplexed (WDM) systems, i