A novel distributed control protocol in dynamic wavelength-routed optical networks

Path selection has long been one of the most important issues in the network design and management, which is also referred to as routing and wavelength assignment in the optical network domain. In this article we investigate the RWA problem for dynamic wavelength-routed mesh networks in a fully distributed controlled environment. We present a novel routing and signaling protocol called Asynchronous Criticality Avoidance (ACA), which is devised to reduce the mutual interference between lightpaths launched by different source-destination pairs to improve network performance in terms of blocking probability. With the fixed alternate routing architecture, the ACA protocol dynamically marks a set of wavelength channels as critical if the occupancy of the channels causes a bottleneck between an S-D pair with a width equal to or narrower than a predefined threshold. To support a distributed control environment, a suite of signaling processes is devised to realize the criticality avoidance mechanism, with which a two-stage routing and wavelength assignment (or criticality avoidance routing) is performed. The ACA protocol has been shown by simulations to be capable of better performance than existing schemes.