A Review of Routing and Wavelength Assignment Approaches for Wavelength- Routed Optical WDM Networks

This study focuses on the routing and Wavelength-Assignment (RWA) problem in wavelength-routed optical WDM networks. Most of the attention is devoted to such networks operating under the wavelength-continuity constraint, in which lightpaths are set up for connection requests between node pairs, and a single lightpath must occupy the same wavelength on all of the links that it spans. In setting up a lightpath, a route must be selected and a wavelength must be assigned to the lightpath. If no wavelength is available for this lightpath on the selected route, then the connection request is blocked. We examine the RWA problem and review various routing approaches and wavelengthassignment approaches proposed in the literature. We also briefly consider the characteristics of wavelength-converted networks (which do not have the wavelength-continuity constraint), and we examine the associated research problems and challenges. Finally, we propose a new wavelengthassignment scheme, called Distributed Relative Capacity Loss (DRCL), which works well in distributed-controlled networks, and we demonstrate the performance of DRCL through simulation. 1