Simple and effective routing and wavelength assignment in transparent optical networks

Transparent optical networks must support dynamic traffic demands and end-to-end optical transmission. We present a new physically-aware algorithm based on dynamic programming for routing and wavelength assignment in such networks that considers both linear and nonlinear impairments that accumulated along the transmission path. We show that our algorithm scales well to large networks and typically yields the lowest blocking probability when compared to several existing methods. In addition, it is flexible and can adapt to situations where either linear or nonlinear impairments dominate.