Multihop Virtual Topology Design in WDM Optical Networks for Self-Similar Traffic

In this paper, we consider the problem of designing virtual topologies for multihop optical WDM networks when the traffic is self-similar in nature. Studies over the last few years suggest that the network traffic is bursty and can be much better modeled using self similar process instead of Poisson process. We examine buffer sizes of a network and observe that, even with reasonably low buffer overflow probability, the maximum buffer size requirement for self-similar traffic can be very large. Therefore, a self-similar traffic model has an impact on the queuing delay which is usually much higher than that obtained with the Poisson model. We investigate the problem of constructing the virtual topology with these two types of traffic and solve it with two algorithmic approaches: Greedy (Heuristic) algorithm and Evolutionary algorithm. While the greedy algorithm performs a least-cost search on the total delay along paths for routing traffic in a multihop fashion, the evolutionary algorithm uses genetic methods to optimize the average delay in a network. We analyze and compare our proposed algorithms with an existing algorithm via different performance parameters. Interestingly, with both the proposed algorithms the difference in the queuing delays, caused by self-similar and Poisson traffic, results in different multihop virtual topologies.