Cost Effective Shared Path Protection for WDM Optical Mesh Networks with Partial Wavelength Conversion

In this paper, we study routing and wavelength assignment of connection requests in survivable WDM optical mesh networks employing shared path protection with partial wavelength conversion while 100% restorability is guaranteed against any single failures. We formulate the problem as a linear integer program under a static traffic model. The objective is to minimize the total cost of wavelength-links and wavelength converters used by working paths and protection paths of all connections. A weight factor is used which is defined as the cost ratio of a wavelength converter and a wavelength-link. Depending on the relative cost of bandwidth and wavelength conversion, the optimization objective allows a proper tradeoff between the two. The proposed algorithm, the shortest-widest-path-first (SWPF) algorithm, uses a modified Dijkstra's algorithm to find a working path and a protection path for each connection request in the wavelength graph transformed from the original network topology. When there are multiple candidate paths that have the same minimum total cost, the path along which the maximum number of converters used at each node is minimized is chosen by the SWPF algorithm. We have evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm via extensive simulation. The results indicate that the performance of the proposed algorithm is very close to that of the optimal solutions obtained by solving the ILP formulation and outperforms existing heuristic algorithms in terms of total number of converters used and the maximum number of converters required at each node in the network. The proposed algorithm also achieves slightly better performance in terms of total cost of wavelength-links and converters used by all connections. We also investigated shared path protection employing converter sharing. The results show that the technique can reduce not only the total number of converters used in the network but also the maximum number of converters required at each node, especially when a large number of converters are needed in the network. In this study, although the ILP formulation is based on static traffic, the proposed algorithm is also applicable to routing dynamic connection requests.