Routing and wavelength assignment with maximum resource sharing in WDM mesh networks with path-based protection

In this paper, we address the problem of routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) in path-protected WDM mesh networks with the objective of maximizing the sharing chances of wavelength links and optical-electronic-optical regenerators (OEOs) between demands, and hence, minimize the overall network resource needed. Both an integer liner program (ILP) solution and a Tabu search heuristic are proposed and their performance is experimentally evaluated through extensive simulation over different network topologies. Our simulation results confirm an average of 50 % reduction in the number of OEOs compared to that required with the well-known shared-path protection scheme in which only wavelength links are shared among different traffic demands.