Lightpath communications: an approach to high bandwidth opticalWAN's

An architectural approach that meets high bandwidth requirements by introducing a communication architecture based on lightpaths, optical transmission paths in the network, is introduced. Since lightpaths form the building block of the proposed architecture, its performance hinges on their efficient establishment and management. It is shown that although the problem of optimally establishing lightpaths is NP-complete, simple heuristics provide near optimal substitutes for several of the basic problems motivated by a lightpath-based architecture