Dynamic reconfiguration policies for reconfigurable coded-WDM PONs

This article studies the issues arising when reconfiguring coded-WDM networks to provide protection against eavesdropping. Although the ability to reconfigure coded-WDM PONs dynamically has been recognized as an effective means of improving the security of OCDMA networks, this article provides the first in-depth study of the tradeoffs involved in carrying out this reconfiguration process. The article commences by showing that the degree of confidentiality and the traffic loss are two important, but conflicting, objectives in the design of reconfiguration policies. The reconfiguration problem is then formulated as a Markovian decision process (MDP). The results obtained from MDP theory are applied to establish optimal reconfiguration policies for coded-WDM networks with various system parameters. Finally, the advantages of the optimal reconfiguration policies over a class of threshold-based policies are illustrated through simulation results.