Wavelength assignment in optical networks considering physical impairments

Several studies on the routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) problem have already incorporated the physical layer impairments in order to find the appropriate resources for establishing the lightpath. This approach has become known in the literature as impairment aware RWA (IA-RWA). Although it is a more realistic approach compared to the RWA, the conventional IA-RWA approach usually neglects the degradation caused by the establishment of a new lightpath in the others already established in the network. In this paper we adopted an IA-RWA approach that takes into account these degradations. From the perspective of this new approach, we conducted a performance evaluation study comparing some wavelength assignment algorithms known in the literature and a new algorithm proposed in this paper. Simulation results show that our algorithm outperforms all others evaluated.