Optimal regenerator assignment and resource allocation strategies for translucent optical networks

Physical layer impairments in wavelength-routed networks limit the maximum distance, a signal can travel in the optical domain, without significant distortion. Therefore, signal regeneration is required at some intermediate nodes for long-haul lightpaths. In translucent WDM networks, sparsely located regenerators at certain nodes can be used to offset the impact of physical layer impairments. The routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) techniques in such translucent networks need to take into consideration the availability of regenerators and the maximum optical reach of the transparent lightpaths (without any regeneration). Although there has been significant research interest in RWA algorithms for translucent networks, much of the research has focused on dynamic RWA techniques. Only a handful of recent papers have considered the static (offline) case, and they typically propose heuristic algorithms to solve this complex design problem for practical networks. In this paper, we propose a generalized integer linear program (ILP) based formulation for static regenerator assignment and RWA in translucent WDM optical networks, with sparse regenerator placement. To the best of our knowledge, such a formulation that optimally allocates resources for a set of lightpaths for translucent networks, given the physical network, the locations of the regenerators, and the maximum optical reach has not been considered before. The proposed formulation is important for two reasons. First, it can serve as a benchmark for evaluating different heuristic approaches that may be developedin the future. Second, we show that using a novel node representation technique, it is possible to drastically reduce the number of integer variables. This means that unlike existing ILP formulations, our approach can actually be used to generate optimal solutions for practical networks, with hundreds of lightpath demands.