Improved algorithms for dynamic routing and wavelength assignment in WDM all-optical mesh networks

Existing research has shown that the mode in which Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) of lightpath requests are carried out can significantly affect resource consumption in optical WDM networks. The increase in resource consumption in turn directly affects the blocking probability for future lightpath requests. The RWA problem in all-optical networks is known to be NP-Complete. In this paper we propose two heuristic dynamic RWA algorithms namely MLBF (Minimum Load Best Fit) and MLF (Minimum Load Fit) for all-optical mesh networks that can solve the RWA problem effectively in polynomial time. Performance comparisons show that the proposed algorithms outperform some earlier well-known strategies.