Addressing the electronic bottleneck to virtual topology design of optical networks

The virtual topology design of optical networks is generally formulated as an optimization problem with the objective of attain the minimum congestion on the traffic load of the lightpaths. However, the data transmission capacity of the networks is not being limited by the optical layer any more. Nowadays, the electronic data processing capacity of the nodes, the so-called electronic bottleneck, is the most severe limitation to the traffic transmission rate growth of high-speed optical networks, due to the great development of the optical layer resources in the past years. This work presents a novel formulation to design virtual topologies of optical networks that minimizes the electronic data processing in the networks nodes, focusing the optimization objective on node congestion, (electronic data processing) instead of on lightpath congestion (optical data transmission). A comparison between the former congestion minimization formulation and the new one proposed in this work is done, analyzing the impact on congestion and the electronic data processing distribution among the network nodes. A significant reduction in the processing time of the proposed mixed-integer optimization problem is also reported.