Simulated Annealing Routing and Wavelength Lower Bound Estimation on WDM Optical Multistage Networks

Multistage interconnection networks (MINs) are popular in switching and communication applications and have been used in telecommunication and parallel computing systems for many years. Crosstalk a major problem introduced by an optical MIN, is caused by coupling two signals within a switching element. We focus on an efficient solution to avoiding crosstalk by routing traffic through an N3N optical network to avoid coupling two signals within each switching element using wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) and a time-division approach. Under the constraint of avoiding crosstalk, the interest is on realizing a permutation that uses the minimum number of passes for routing. This routing problem is an NP-hard problem. Many heuristic algorithms are already designed by researchers to perform this routing such as a sequential algorithm, a degree-descending algorithm, etc. The genetic algorithm is used successfully to improve the performance over the heuristic algorithms. The drawback of the genetic algorithm is its long running times. We use the simulated annealing algorithm to improve the performance of solving the problem and optimizing the result. In addition, a wavelength lower bound estimate on the minimum number of passes required is calculated and compared to the results obtained using heuristic, genetic, and simulated annealing algorithms. Many cases are tested and the results are compared to the results of other algorithms to show the advantages of simulated annealing algorithm