Routing and wavelength assignment for an agile optical network

Although having huge bandwidth, today´s optical networks suffer the insufficient agility in transporting dynamic traffic such as IP traffic flows, due to its lack of flexible provisioning capability to offer lightpaths that can keep pace with the dynamics of sub-wavelength traffic. In this paper, we introduce an agile optical network, and propose an intelligent routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) algorithm. With this algorithm, the agile optical network can significantly expedite lightpath setup through intelligent lightpath partition/concatenation, and improves the performance for transporting dynamic sub-wavelength traffic, by using some special optical nodes called lightpath cross-connects.