A novel dynamic RWA algorithm with intelligent granularity regulation in multi-granular all-optical networks

With the great advances of DWDM technology, optical cross-connects have to deal with much more wavelengths. Accordingly, the size of optical cross-connects become larger and larger; also the management cost is much higher. To simplify the architecture of cross-connects for low-complexity maintenance, waveband switching (WBS) in conjunction with several optical cross-connect architectures have been proposed and attracted much attention recently. The main concept of WBS is to group multiple wavelengths into a single waveband and what it concerns includes cross-connect cost and port count reduction. In this paper, we investigate the dynamic RWA problem (MG_DRWA) in WBS networks comprising of all-optical switches based on a cost-effective multi-granular optical cross-connect (MG-OXC) architecture. With this reconfigurable architecture, an optical cross-connect can switch at either fiber level, waveband level, or wavelength level according to its configuration. In order to effectively accommodate dynamic traffic demand, we propose a new MG_DRWA algorithm. Numerical results reveal that the proposed algorithm can achieve significantly better blocking performance as compared to a previously proposed algorithm named MILB under various traffic loads.