Effect of Wavelength Conversion in Survivable Wavelength Routed Optical WDM Networks with Alternate Routing

This study focuses on the routing and wavelength assignment in wavelength-routed optical wavelength-divisioned -multiplexed networks with circuit switching using wavelength conversion. Wavelength conversion has been proposed for use in such networks to improve the efficiency. The crucial factors which determine the efficiency of using wavelength conversion as opposed to not using them, is the number of wavelengths required to satisfy the network traffic demand and the blocking of traffic demands by the network. In addition to considering wavelength conversion, this study investigates the effect of having multiple paths between each source-destination pair. We consider the cases where protection is necessary for each of the primary paths between every source-destination pair and hence a backup path also has to be established during connection set up, and the case when no protection is necessary. We study the effect of wavelength conversion with different protection schemes. By simulating and analyzing a large number of randomly generated networks we report results of our study of the above schemes under both incremental and dynamic traffic conditions. The study shows that utilizing wavelength conversion has a considerable impact on reducing network blocking under both incremental and dynamic traffic conditions, on the other hand we find the difference in wavelength requirements of the various schemes considered is minimal.