Adaptive alternate routing in WDM networks and its performance tradeoffs in the presence of wavelength converters

Routing in wavelength-routed all-optical WDM networks has received much attention in the past decade, for which fixed and dynamic routing methods have been proposed. Taking into account the observation that wavelength-routed all-optical WDM networks are similar to circuit-switched voice networks, except with regard to wavelength conversion, we propose an adaptive alternate routing (AAR) scheme for wavelength-routed all-optical WDM networks. A major benefit of AAR is that it can operate and adapt without requiring an exchange of network status, i.e., it is an information-less adaptive routing scheme. The scope of this work is to understand this scheme in its own right since no other dynamic routing schemes are known to have the information-less property. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study of AAR with regard to factors such as the number of converters, load conditions, traffic patterns, network topologies, and the number of alternate paths considered. We observe that the routing scheme with multiple alternate routes provides more gain at a lower load instead of requiring any nodes to be equipped with wavelength converters. On the other hand, the availability of wavelength converters at some nodes, along with adaptive routing, is beneficial at a moderate to high load without requiring all nodes to be equipped with wavelength converters. We also observed that a small number of alternate routes considered in a network without wavelength converters gives a much better performance than a network with full wavelength converters and fewer alternate routes. Throughout this study, we observed that the proposed adaptive alternate routing scheme adapts well to the network traffic condition.