Ant colony optimization for survivable virtual topology mapping in optical WDM networks

The high capacity of fibers used in optical networks, can be divided into many channels, using the WDM technology. Any damage to a fiber causes all the channels routed through this link to be broken, which may result in a serious amount of data loss. As a solution to this problem, the virtual layer can be mapped onto the physical topology, such that, a failure on any physical link does not disconnect the virtual topology. This is known as the survivable virtual topology mapping problem. In this study, our aim is to determine a suitable ant colony optimization algorithm to solve this problem. Our results show that ant colony heuristics perform remarkably well while producing high quality solutions in less than half a minute.