Scalable impairment-aware anycast routing in multi-domain optical Grid networks

In optical grid networks, the main challenge is to account for not only network parameters, but also for resource availability. Anycast routing has previously been proposed as an effective solution to provide job scheduling services in optical grids, offering a generic interface to access grid resources and services. The main weakness of this approach is its limited scalability, especially in a multi-domain scenario. This paper proposes a novel anycast proxy architecture, which extends the anycast principle to a multi-domain scenario. The main purpose of the architecture is to perform aggregation of resource and network states, and as such improve computational scalability and reduce control plane traffic. Furthermore, the architecture has the desirable properties of allowing Grid domains to maintain their autonomy and hide internal configuration details from other domains. Finally, we propose an impairment-aware anycast routing algorithm that incorporates the main physical layer characteristics of large-scale optical networks into its path computation process. By integrating the proposed routing scheme into the introduced architecture we demonstrate significant network performance improvements.