Performance Study of Distributed Wavelength Reservation Protocols within Both Single and Multi-Fiber WDM Networks

Distributed wavelength reservation protocols are employed to dynamically set up and tear down lightpaths in WDM networks. In this paper, discrete event-driven simulations are carried out to investigate the performance of different protocols under both single and multi-fiber circumstances. Simulation results indicate that the behavior of these protocols varies noticeably between single and multi-fiber networks. Discussions on these results are also presented. It is found that the preferred scheme in the literature, which adopts backward reservation with random wavelength selection, does well in single-fiber scenarios. But this scheme fails to be excellent in multi-fiber scenarios since it cannot take full advantage of multiple fibers. Then, we extend the reservation protocols for multi-fiber networks and propose a novel wavelength selection policy called Maximum-Availability policy. Results show that our scheme will give an outstanding performance in both single and multi-fiber networks.