Collaboration over a service-oriented fiber optic networking platform

Collaborative tools are among the most resource intensive applications today. Broadband technologies such as fiber-optic communication provide a way to bring these tools to a collaborative platform regardless of geography. In this paper, we focus on the feasibility of the network architecture that supports the collaboration. We solve the routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) problem in this specific context while taking into account the availability of the shared non-network resources. Unlike the previous studies, a traffic demand is defined as a set of one-to-one simultaneous connections to model the traffic of collaboration over a non-multicast capable optical network. The offline version of the problem is discussed, with and without the time as a parameter for scheduling purposes. The case where the network is meant to carry time-multiplexed traffic over the wavelengths is also discussed. Several solutions based on Integer Linear Programs (ILP) and heuristics are proposed, implemented and their performance compared. Two types of ILPs are proposed: link and path formulations. While the link formulations give optimal solutions, they take a long time to solve and thus they can only be used for small problems. Path formulations scale better but at the expense of optimality.