Allocation of Wavelength Converters in All-Optical WDM Networks with Alternate Routing

This paper proposes a wavelength converter placement method such that the same network will yield low connection blocking probability even when the alternate routing algorithm is replaced by a different one. Since the objective of the alternate routing algorithms used in the networks is to minimize blocking probability, the optimal traffic pattern which minimize the blocked traffic intensity is utilized for finding the locations of wavelength converters. The key idea is to place the wavelength converters at the nodes where they are needed most. Simulations have been performed to study the performance of the proposed wavelength converter placement method. The simulation results have shown that the proposed placement method yields smaller connection blocking probability than the two converter placement methods when the networks employ the hop count based fixedalternate routing or least-loaded routing.