Reconfiguration procedures for multihop WDM packet networks with non-negligible propagation delay

The logical configuration of a WDM-based network can be changed by reassigning wavelengths to tunable transmitters and/or receivers of nodes. The objective of network reconfiguration is to improve the network performance in terms of achievable maximum throughput. After obtaining an optimal node placement by using a rearrangement algorithm, we must actually reconfigure the network according to some reconfiguration procedure that defines a way logically to move nodes to optimal places. We study reconfiguration procedures for multihop WDM packet networks with non-negligible propagation delay between any pair of nodes. By means of simulation, we examine the impact of the propagation delay and the tuning time of receivers normalized by packet transmission time upon the maximum total delay and the number of lost packets during reconfiguration. Moreover, we introduce some mechanisms for avoiding packet loss during reconfiguration. We then compare the performance of the procedures with these mechanisms