Methodologies on Designing a Hybrid Shared-Mesh Protected WDM Network with Sparse Wavelength Conversion and Regeneration

In a wavelength-routed WDM optical network, having regeneration and wavelength conversion at every node is not cost-effective. However, in a nation-wide backbone network, regeneration is required for some lightpaths. With shared-mesh protection, wavelength-conversion is helpful in increasing the wavelength sharing among protection paths therefore can improve resource-utilization. In this work we study the problem of selecting wavelength-conversion and regeneration sites in such a network. We show that the wavelength converter placement problem can be formulated as an integer linear program and propose several heuristics for solving the sparse wavelength conversion and regeneration problem.