A framework for distributed provisioning availability-guaranteed least-cost lightpaths in WDM mesh networks

The trend in the development of intelligent optical networks is the move towards a unified solution, to support voice, data, and various services. Nowadays, different applications may need different levels of protection and differ in how much they are willing to pay for the service they get. A control scheme which is used to set up and tear down lightpaths, should not only be fast and efficient, but also be scalable. In addition, it should also try to minimize the connection cost and the number of blocked connections while satisfying the requested level of availability. In this work we choose the availability of a connection as a quality of service (QoS) parameter to denote different levels of protection. It is proven that the Availability-Guaranteed least-cost (AGLC) routing problem is NP-complete. We propose a distributed control scheme based on parallel fixed alternative routing approach for establishing AGLC lightpaths. The proposed framework performance is studied through extensive simulation experiments on wavelength selective network with different traffic loads. The simulation results show that our proposed framework provides better performance in terms of average blocking probability, and average routing distance average path cost.