Performance of Adaptive Routing in Wavelength-Routed Networks with Wavelength Conversion Capability

This paper concerns itself with the performance of adaptive routing in wavelength-routed networks with wavelength conversion capability. Exploiting the concept of load balancing, we propose an adaptive weighted-shortest-cost-path (WSCP) routing strategy. The salient feature of WSCP is that it seeks the path that minimizes the resource cost while simultaneously maintaining the traffic load among the links as balanced as possible. In our simulation, we compare the blocking probability, average hops and link utilization of WSCP with traditional shortest-cost-path (SCP) strategy, fixed routing and alternate routing. The numerical results show that WSCP can enhance blocking performance and just lengthen hop distances a little longer. The improvement is more significant in denser networks or with more wavelengths. We also develop an analytical model to estimate blocking performance of WSCP and compare analyses with simulations. Because of the benefit from load balancing, the proposed WSCP strategy can be used as a path selection algorithm in traffic engineering.