Adaptive Load Balancing for the Agile All-Photonic Network

A novel routing architecture that balances incoming traffic over the Agile All-Photonic Network (AAPN) is proposed. The architecture is based on the adaptive highest random weight (Adaptive HRW) algorithm proposed to design load balanced internet routers. It extends the adaptive HRW algorithm by assigning balancing weights to each source-destination edge node pair in the network. The weights are adapted based on the traffic load of the downstream and upstream links in the network. The architecture can be seen as a combination of adaptive core node scheduling and adaptive load balancing at the edge nodes. It is stateless and can compute routes quickly based on the packet flow identifier. This is an important issue when deploying AAPN as an internet backbone network where the number of flows is large and storing flow state in lookup tables can limit the network performance.