Efficient Implementations of Heuristics for Routing and Wavelength Assignment

The problem of Routing and Wavelength Assignment in Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) optical networks consists in routing a set of lightpaths and assigning a wavelength to each of them, such that lightpaths whose routes share a common fiber are assigned to different wavelengths. When the objective is to minimize the total number of wavelengths used, this problem is NP-hard. The current state-of-the-art heuristics were proposed in 2007 by Skorin-Kapov. The solutions provided by these heuristics were nearoptimal. However, the associated running times reported were high. In this paper, we propose efficient implementations of these heuristics and reevaluate them on a broader set of testbed instances.