Sliding scheduled lightpath provisioning by mixed partition coloring in WDM optical networks

In WDM optical networks, lightpath provisioning for static, incremental and dynamic traffic model has been widely investigated. However, Internet connectivity services are increasingly showing a new kind of traffic type in the context of optical networks, i.e., sliding scheduled traffic, which does not have a rigid deadline and allows flexible sliding within a large time window. This new traffic type offers opportunity of more efficiently utilizing network resources to accommodate more traffic, and poses new challenges of exploiting the flexibility of scheduling time. In this paper, we formulate the static sliding scheduled lightpath demand (SSLD) provisioning problem as a mixed partition coloring model in which routing and wavelength assignment are conducted simultaneously in compliance with the allowed time window of each request. Then, we propose a novel one-step heuristic algorithm named as maximum conflict degree first conflict reducing (MCDF-CR) to solve the SSLD provisioning problem based on mixed partition coloring model. Simulation results show that our approach can improve wavelengths utilization compared to previous heuristics.