A dynamic routing algorithm with load balancing heuristics for restorable connections in WDM networks

Dynamic routing of a restorable connection requires a pair of link-disjoint primary and backup lightpaths to be found online when a connection request arrives at the network. We present a distributed dynamic routing algorithm for restorable connections that uses load balancing heuristics in both primary and backup path computations to achieve low demand blocking. The key idea is to assign costs to links so that heavily loaded links will be avoided in the routing of the primary and backup paths and links with a high chance of including a sharable backup channel will be included in the backup path. Simulation results showed that the algorithm performs significantly better than a simple distributed algorithm and achieves comparable performance as a centralized algorithm.