Adaptive routing and wavelength assignment with power constraints using Ant Colony Optimization

This work proposes a novel routing algorithm for transparent optical networks, which is based on the ant colony optimization (ACO) meta-heuristics. It takes into consideration the bit error rate (BER) of the connections that is derived from amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise accumulated along the lightpath. We implement a call admission control (CAC) to verify if a connection meets the following criteria: it has a BER below the maximum level, which is given by the sensitivity power at each component, and the total aggregate power on every network link is below a threshold, which is necessary to mitigate fiber non-linear effects. By using an integrated generalized multi-protocol label switching (GMPLS) control plane, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm over a fixed-alternate routing scheme to reduce the overall blocking probability.