Ant based Hyper Heuristic for Physical Impairment aware routing and wavelength assignment

In this study, we solve the routing and wavelength assignment problem considering physical constraints of Amplified Spontaneous Emission in erbium-doped fiber amplifiers and crosstalk noise at optical cross-connects, with Ant Colony based Hyper Heuristics. Our aim is to minimize the total bit error rate of all the routed lightpaths over optical wavelength division multiplexing networks. We compare our results with single heuristic approaches and Tabu Search Hyper Heuristic. The results show that, ACHH gives good-quality solutions to the problem, while using a shorter time than TSHH and other successful heuristics. The resource utilization of both HHs outperforms all other heuristics when the network resources are scarce.