Lightpath routing and wavelength assignment for static demand in translucent optical networks

Translucent optical networks use sparsely located regenerator nodes to increase the optical reach, otherwise limited by the physical layer impairments. Routing in translucent networks often causes the lightpath to traverse a fiber more than once, requiring the use of multiple wavelengths on a fiber for the same lightpath. Most of the routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) algorithms for static demand in translucent networks (termed static RWA) require loop-free routes for shortest path routing and also are agnostic to traffic load. In this paper, we address the problem of static RWA in translucent networks without using physical layer information and show how to route lightpaths on paths with a loop (i.e., not a simple path). We propose integer linear programming formulation to get the exact solutions to the static RWA problem. This work is the first one to optimally solve the static RWA problem for non-simple paths, providing the lower bound on the number of wavelengths and regeneration needed for static lightpath establishment when regeneration facilities are limited. We propose a heuristic algorithm based on the concept of Wardrop equilibrium, to adaptively equalize the mean delay along all the lightpath routes from source to destination. The proposed heuristic can not only accommodate the correlation between feasible lightpath routes but also account for the fact that alternate routes correspond to different levels of choice randomness. Wavelength assignment is done using graph coloring with branch-and-price method. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed heuristic reduces the number of regenerators and wavelengths required to satisfy a given demand.